Related papers: Statistical Mechanical Approach to Human Language
Building on ideas from linguistics, psychology, and social sciences about the possible mechanisms of human decision-making, we propose a novel theoretical framework for the citation analysis. Given the existing trend to investigate citation…
The internal representations learned by language models consistently exhibit striking geometric structure: calendar months organize into a circle, historical years form a smooth one-dimensional manifold, and cities' latitudes and longitudes…
Taylor's law describes the fluctuation characteristics underlying a system in which the variance of an event within a time span grows by a power law with respect to the mean. Although Taylor's law has been applied in many natural and social…
A fundamental challenge in the cognitive sciences is discovering the dynamics that govern behaviour. Take the example of spoken language, which is characterised by a highly variable and complex set of physical movements that map onto the…
The ability to produce and understand an unlimited number of different sentences is a hallmark of human language. Linguists have sought to define the essence of this generative capacity using formal grammars that describe the syntactic…
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…
Human languages employ constructions that tacitly assume specific properties of the limited range of phenomena they evolved to describe. These assumed properties are true features of that limited context, but may not be general or precise…
Uniquely human abilities may arise from special-purpose brain circuitry, or from concerted general capacity increases due to our outsized brains. We forward a novel hypothesis of the relation between computational capacity and brain size,…
There are many scientific problems generated by the multiple and conflicting alternative definitions of linguistic recursion and human recursive processing that exist in the literature. The purpose of this article is to make available to…
Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…
This paper revisits Menzerath's Law, also known as the Menzerath-Altmann Law, which models a relationship between the length of a linguistic construct and the average length of its constituents. Recent findings indicate that simple…
In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its…
Zipf's law is the most common statistical distribution displaying scaling behavior. Cities, populations or firms are just examples of this seemingly universal law. Although many different models have been proposed, no general theoretical…
Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently been shown to produce estimates of psycholinguistic norms, such as valence, arousal, or concreteness, for words and multiword expressions, that correlate with human judgments. These estimates are…
This paper compares a qualitative reasoning model of translation with a quantitative statistical model. We consider these models within the context of two hypothetical speech translation systems, starting with a logic-based design and…
We consider the spreading and competition of languages that are spoken by a population of individuals. The individuals can change their mother tongue during their lifespan, pass on their language to their offspring and finally die. The…
The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication,…
Metaphors and sarcasm are precious fruits of our highly evolved social communication skills. However, children with the condition then known as Asperger syndrome are known to have difficulties in comprehending sarcasm, even if they possess…
Time evolutions of number of cities, population of cities, world population, and size distribution of present languages are studied in terms of a new model, where population of each city increases by a random rate and decreases by a random…