Related papers: A universal model for languages and cities, and th…
An earlier study (Nettle 1999b) concluded, based on computer simulations and some inferences from empirical data, that languages will change the more slowly the larger the population gets. We replicate this study using a more complete…
While there exist scores of natural languages, each with its unique features and idiosyncrasies, they all share a unifying theme: enabling human communication. We may thus reasonably predict that human cognition shapes how these languages…
Over the last decades, in disciplines as diverse as economics, geography, and complex systems, a perspective has arisen proposing that many properties of cities are quantitatively predictable due to agglomeration or scaling effects. Using…
Neural scaling laws are observed in a range of domains, to date with no universal understanding of why they occur. Recent theories suggest that loss power laws arise from Zipf's law, a power law observed in domains like natural language.…
We review recent progress in understanding the meaning of mutual information in natural language. Let us define words in a text as strings that occur sufficiently often. In a few previous papers, we have shown that a power-law distribution…
In this paper we combine statistical analysis of large text databases and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. Besides the sublinear scaling of the vocabulary size with…
Many complex systems are composed of disparate, interacting types of varying sizes: Species abundances in ecosystems, firm sizes in markets, city populations in countries, word counts in language, etc. A longstanding mystery of complex…
We model the generation of words with independent unequal probabilities of occurrence of letters. We prove that the probability $p(r)$ of occurrence of words of rank $r$ has a power asymptotics. As distinct from the paper published earlier…
This paper provides a new geospatial perspective on whether or not Zipf's law holds for all cities or for the largest cities in the United States using a massive dataset and its computing. A major problem around this issue is how to define…
Increasing evidence demonstrates that in many places language coexistence has become ubiquitous and essential for supporting language and cultural diversity and associated with its financial and economic benefits. The competitive evolution…
In this paper we try to model certain features of human language complexity by means of advanced concepts borrowed from statistical mechanics. We use a time series approach, the diffusion entropy method (DE), to compute the complexity of an…
Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…
The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…
City-size distributions follow an approximate power law in various countries despite high volatility in relative city sizes over time. Our empirical evidence for the United States and Japan indicates that the scaling law stems from a…
We study a resource utilization scenario characterized by intrinsic fitness. To describe the growth and organization of different cities, we consider a model for resource utilization where many restaurants compete, as in a game, to attract…
Evolution and propagation of the world's languages is a complex phenomenon, driven, to a large extent, by social interactions. Multilingual society can be seen as a system of interacting agents, where the interaction leads to a modification…
City size distributions are known to be well approximated by power laws across a wide range of countries. But such distributions are also meaningful at other spatial scales, such as within certain regions of a country. Using data from…
The rank-size regularity known as Zipf's law is one of scaling laws and frequently observed within the natural living world and in social institutions. Many scientists tried to derive the rank-size scaling relation by entropy-maximizing…
A good understanding of cities is crucial to implement urban planning policies leading to social and economic sustainability and an efficient use of resources. While urban concentration has been associated with both positive and negative…
How do words change their meaning? Although semantic evolution is driven by a variety of distinct factors, including linguistic, societal, and technological ones, we find that there is one law that holds universally across five major…