Related papers: A universal model for languages and cities, and th…
Human languages evolve continuously, and a puzzling problem is how to reconcile the apparent robustness of most of the deep linguistic structures we use with the evidence that they undergo possibly slow, yet ceaseless, changes. Is the state…
Most languages use the relative order between words to encode meaning relations. Languages differ, however, in what orders they use and how these orders are mapped onto different meanings. We test the hypothesis that, despite these…
We propose hypotheses describing the empirical finding of an association between the exponents of urban GDP scaling and Zipf's law for cities. These hypotheses represent various combinations of directional or reciprocal causal links between…
Competition between languages or cultural traits diffusing in the same geographical area is studied combining the language competition model of Abrams and Strogatz and a human dispersal model on an inhomogeneous substrate. Also, the effect…
Recent studies of cluster distribution in various ecosystems revealed Pareto statistics for the size of spatial colonies. These results were supported by cellular automata simulations that yield robust criticality for endogenous pattern…
Zipf's law is well known in linguistics: the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. This is a special case of a more general power law, a common phenomenon in many kinds of real-world statistical data. Here, it is shown…
This paper introduces new methods based on exponential families for modeling the correlations between words in text and speech. While previous work assumed the effects of word co-occurrence statistics to be constant over a window of several…
We show that there is a common mode of origin for the power laws observed in two different models: (i) the Pareto law for the distribution of money among the agents with random saving propensities in an ideal gas-like market model and (ii)…
In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two…
The power law is useful in describing count phenomena such as network degrees and word frequencies. With a single parameter, it captures the main feature that the frequencies are linear on the log-log scale. Nevertheless, there have been…
We inspect the deductive connection between the neural scaling law and Zipf's law -- two statements discussed in machine learning and quantitative linguistics. The neural scaling law describes how the cross entropy rate of a foundation…
The vast majority of travel takes place within cities. Recently, new data has become available which allows for the discovery of urban mobility patterns which differ from established results about long distance travel. Specifically, the…
Voting data from city-councillors, state and federal deputies elections are analyzed and considered as a response function of a social system with underlying dynamics leading to complex behavior. The voting results from the last two general…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
Zipfs Law states that rank-size distributions of city populations follow a power law with an exponent of -1. The assertion of a universal power law is controversial because the linearity and slope appear to vary over time and among…
Evaluating whether large language models (LLMs) capture the structure of natural language beyond local fluency remains an open challenge. Existing evaluation methods, largely based on task performance or short-context behavior, provide…
Our world is open-ended, non-stationary, and constantly evolving; thus what we talk about and how we talk about it change over time. This inherent dynamic nature of language contrasts with the current static language modelling paradigm,…
What processes can explain how very large populations are able to converge on the use of a particular word or grammatical construction without global coordination? Answering this question helps to understand why new language constructs…
The formation of sentences is a highly structured and history-dependent process. The probability of using a specific word in a sentence strongly depends on the 'history' of word-usage earlier in that sentence. We study a simple…
This paper investigates the influence of environmental noise on the characteristic timescale of the dynamics of density-dependent populations. General results are obtained on the statistics of time spent in rarity and time spent in…