Related papers: Statistical Mechanical Approach to Human Language
If language evolved by sexual selection to display superior intelligence, then we require conversational skills, to impress other people, gain high social status, and get a mate. Conversational skills include a Theory of Mind, a sense of…
While demographic factors like age and gender change the way people talk, and in particular, the way people talk to machines, there is little investigation into how large pre-trained language models (LMs) can adapt to these changes. To…
Over the past century, personality theory and research has successfully identified core sets of characteristics that consistently describe and explain fundamental differences in the way people think, feel and behave. Such characteristics…
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…
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 comparison of two english texts from Lewis Carroll, one (Alice in wonderland), also translated into esperanto, the other (Through a looking glass) are discussed in order to observe whether natural and artificial languages significantly…
Human-like personality traits have recently been discovered in large language models, raising the hypothesis that their (known and as yet undiscovered) biases conform with human latent psychological constructs. While large conversational…
Statistics pedagogy values using a variety of examples. Thanks to text resources on the Web, and since statistical packages have the ability to analyze string data, it is now easy to use language-based examples in a statistics class. Three…
In what ways might statistical signals in linguistic input assist with the acquisition of syntax? Here we hypothesize a mechanism called collocational bootstrapping, in which regularities in word co-occurrence patterns can provide cues to…
People tend to align their use of language to the linguistic behaviour of their own ingroup and to simultaneously diverge from the language use of outgroups. This paper proposes to model this phenomenon of sociolinguistic identity…
The basic problem of semantic compression is to minimize the length of a message while preserving its meaning. This differs from classical notions of compression in that the distortion is not measured directly at the level of bits, but…
Over the past two centuries, the frequency of word usage in major Western languages has exhibited small amplitude regular cycles, superimposed on larger background trends. We show that these cycles of word usage organize into semantically…
I give a highly selective overview of the way statistical mechanics explains the microscopic origins of the time asymmetric evolution of macroscopic systems towards equilibrium and of first order phase transitions in equilibrium. These…
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…
The explanations of large language models have recently been shown to be sensitive to the randomness used for their training, creating a need to characterize this sensitivity. In this paper, we propose a characterization that questions the…
Recent advances in natural language processing (NLP) have produced general models that can perform complex tasks such as summarizing long passages and translating across languages. Here, we introduce a method to extract adjective…
Despite being a paradigm of quantitative linguistics, Zipf's law for words suffers from three main problems: its formulation is ambiguous, its validity has not been tested rigorously from a statistical point of view, and it has not been…
In recent years, central components of a new approach to linguistics, the Minimalist Program (MP) have come closer to physics. Features of the Minimalist Program, such as the unconstrained nature of recursive Merge, the operation of the…
Statistical laws describe regular patterns observed in diverse scientific domains, ranging from the magnitude of earthquakes (Gutenberg-Richter law) and metabolic rates in organisms (Kleiber's law), to the frequency distribution of words in…
A quantitative method is suggested, where meanings of words, and grammatic rules about these, of a vocabulary are represented by real numbers. People meet randomly, and average their vocabularies if they are equal; otherwise they either…