Related papers: On Hilberg's Law and Its Links with Guiraud's Law
Scaling properties of language are a useful tool for understanding generative processes in texts. We investigate the scaling relations in citywise Twitter corpora coming from the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United…
In previous research, we showed that 'texts that tell a story' exhibit a statistical structure that is not Maxwell-Boltzmann but Bose-Einstein. Our explanation is that this is due to the presence of 'indistinguishability' in human language…
Understanding the complexity of human language requires an appropriate analysis of the statistical distribution of words in texts. We consider the information retrieval problem of detecting and ranking the relevant words of a text by means…
A correlation is a binary vector that encodes all possible positions of overlaps of two words, where an overlap for an ordered pair of words (u,v) occurs if a suffix of word u matches a prefix of word v. As multiple pairs can have the same…
Zipf (1935) posited that wordforms are optimized to minimize utterances' communicative costs. Under the assumption that cost is given by an utterance's length, he supported this claim by showing that words' lengths are inversely correlated…
Randomized higher-order computation can be seen as being captured by a lambda calculus endowed with a single algebraic operation, namely a construct for binary probabilistic choice. What matters about such computations is the probability of…
A mere hyperbolic law, like the Zipf's law power function, is often inadequate to describe rank-size relationships. An alternative theoretical distribution is proposed based on theoretical physics arguments starting from the Yule-Simon…
The text-length-dependence of real word-frequency distributions can be connected to the general properties of a random book. It is pointed out that this finding has strong implications, when deciding between two conceptually different views…
The word embedding space in neural models is skewed, and correcting this can improve task performance. We point out that most approaches for modeling, correcting, and measuring the symmetry of an embedding space implicitly assume that the…
It has been argued by Shepard that there is a robust psychological law that relates the distance between a pair of items in psychological space and the probability that they will be confused with each other. Specifically, the probability of…
We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical…
Inspired by Hilberg's hypothesis, which states that mutual information between blocks for natural language grows like a power law, we seek for links between power-law growth rate of algorithmic mutual information and of some estimator of…
In this work we analyze statistical properties of 91 relatively small texts in 7 different languages (Spanish, English, French, German, Turkish, Russian, Icelandic) as well as texts with randomly inserted spaces. Despite the size (around…
One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…
Information theory is a mathematical theory of learning with deep connections with topics as diverse as artificial intelligence, statistical physics, and biological evolution. Many primers on information theory paint a broad picture with…
A power-free language is characterized by the number of symbols used and a limit on how many times a block of symbols can repeat consecutively. For certain values of these parameters, it is known that the number of legal words grows…
Recently, it has been claimed that a linear relationship between a measure of information content and word length is expected from word length optimization and it has been shown that this linearity is supported by a strong correlation…
We consider a measure of similarity for infinite words that generalizes the notion of asymptotic or natural density of subsets of natural numbers from number theory. We show that every overlap-free infinite binary word, other than the…
From a grammar point of view, the role of punctuation marks in a sentence is formally defined and well understood. In semantic analysis punctuation plays also a crucial role as a method of avoiding ambiguity of the meaning. A different…
In this paper we consider the class of anti-uniform Huffman codes and derive tight lower and upper bounds on the average length, entropy, and redundancy of such codes in terms of the alphabet size of the source. The Fibonacci distributions…