Zipf's Law and Avoidance of Excessive Synonymy

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very robust as an experimental observation, but to date it escaped satisfactory theoretical explanation. We suggest that Zipf's law may arise from the evolution of word semantics dominated by expansion of meanings and competition of synonyms.Comment: 47 pages; fixed reference list missing in v.

Zipfian Distribution of Words and Word Phrases in American English Speech

Zipf\u27s law states that given some text, the frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its statistical rank. For English if the most common word happens to be “a”, it will appear twice as often as the second most common word and three times more than the third most common word. Zipf\u27s law has been shown to hold for two and three word sequences in all languages examined. In recent years, linguists have begun to notice that speech is structurally different from writing. Nevertheless, no one, to our knowledge has demonstrated that Zipf\u27s Law describes the distribution of words in speech. To do this, we are building custom software in the Python programming language to investigate the distribution of words in the Buckeye Corpus, a collection of 300,000 plus words of American English speech

Going to great lengths in the pursuit of luxury:how longer brand names can enhance the luxury perception of a brand

Brand names are a crucial part of the brand equity and marketing strategy of any company. Research suggests that companies spend considerable time and money to create suitable names for their brands and products. This paper uses the Zipf's law (or Principle of Least Effort) to analyze the perceived luxuriousness of brand names. One of the most robust laws in linguistics, Zipf's law describes the inverse relationship between a word's length and its frequency i.e., the more frequently a word is used in language, the shorter it tends to be. Zipf's law has been applied to many fields of science and in this paper, we provide evidence for the idea that because polysyllabic words (and brand names) are rare in everyday conversation, they are considered as more complex, distant, and abstract and that the use of longer brand names can enhance the perception of how luxurious a brand is (compared with shorter brand names, which are considered to be close, frequent, and concrete to consumers). Our results suggest that shorter names (mono‐syllabic) are better suited to basic brands whereas longer names (tri‐syllabic or more) are more appropriate for luxury brands

Essays on Technology in Presence of Globalization

Technology has long been known to enable globalization in ways previously not thought possible, with instantaneous communication allowing members of organizations all across the globe to communicate and share information with little to no delay. However, as the effects of globalization have become more prominent, they have in turn helped to shape the very technologies that enable these processes. These three essays analyze three examples of how these two processes – globalization and technological development – impact one another. The first looks at a national policy level, attempting to understand how increased possibilities for inside leakers can force governments to consider asylum requests. The second analyzes the issue at the level of corporations, attempting to understand how and why business leaders choose to hire individuals from other countries. The third and final essay analyzes the issue at the most micro level, studying a potential application that could help analyze linguistic factors that have taken a more prominent role in a more globalized society

FREQUENCY IN MORPHOLOGY

calls the traditional rule-based view of grammar into question. These authors emphasize that grammatical rule systems aiming at syntax-directed translation, and even rule systems aimed at the description of a single language, break down when faced with the actual complexit

Modelling hierarchical musical structures with composite probabilistic networks

The thesis is organised as follows:• Chapter 2 provides background information on existing research in the field of computational music harmonisation and generation, as well as some the¬ oretical background on musical structures. Finally, the chapter concludes with an outline of the scope and aims of this research.• Chapter 3 provides a short overview of the field of Machine Learning, ex¬ plaining concepts such as entropy measures and smoothing. The definitions of Markov chains and Hidden Markov models are introduced together with their methods of inference.• Chapter 4 begins with the definition of Hierarchical Hidden Markov models and techniques for linear time inference. It continues by introducing the new concept of Input-Output HHMMs, an extension to the hierarchical models that is derived from Input-Output HMMs.• Chapter 5 is a short chapter that shows the importance of the music rep¬ resentation and model structures for this research, and gives details of the representation.• Chapter 6 outlines the design of the software used for the HHMM modelling, and gives details of the software implementation and use.• Chapter 7 describes how dynamic networks of models were used for the generation of new pieces of music using a "random walk" approach. Several different types of networks are presented, exploring the different possibilities of layering the musical structures and organising the networks.• Chapter 8 tries to evaluate musical examples that were generated with sev¬ eral different types of networks. The evaluation process is both subjective and objective, using the results of a listening experiment as well as cross entropy measures and musical theoretical rules.• Chapter 9 offers a discussion of the methodology of the approach, the con¬ figuration and design of networks and models as well as the learning and generation of the new musical structures.• Chapter 10 concludes the thesis by summarising the research's contribu¬ tions, evaluating whether the project scope has been fulfilled and the major goals of the research have been met

What is the Value of Vagueness?

Classically, vagueness has been considered something bad. It leads to the Sorites paradox, borderline cases, and the (apparent) violation of the logical principle of bivalence. Nevertheless, there have always been scholars claiming that vagueness is also valuable. Many have pointed out that we could not communicate as successfully or efficiently as we do if we would not use vague language. Indeed, we often use vague terms when we could have used more precise ones instead. Many scholars (implicitly or explicitly) assume that we do so because their vagueness has a positive function. But how and in what sense can vagueness be said to have a function or value? This paper is an attempt to give an answer to this question. After clarifying the concepts of vagueness and value, it examines nine arguments for the value of vagueness, which have been discussed in the literature. The (negative) result of this examination is, however, that there is not much reason to believe that vagueness has a value or positive function at all because none of the arguments is conclusive. A tenth argument that has not been discussed so far seems most promising but rests on a solely strategic notion of function

Annotation persistence over dynamic documents

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Civil and Environmental Engineering, 2005.Includes bibliographical references (p. 212-216).Annotations, as a routine practice of actively engaging with reading materials, are heavily used in the paper world to augment the usefulness of documents. By annotation, we include a large variety of creative manipulations by which the otherwise passive reader becomes actively involved in a document. Annotations in digital form possess many benefits paper annotations do not enjoy, such as annotation searching, annotation multi- referencing, and annotation sharing. The digital form also introduces challenges to the process of annotation. This study looks at one of them, annotation persistence over dynamic documents. With the development of annotation software, users now have the opportunity to annotate documents which they don't own, or to which they don't have write permission. In annotation software, annotations are normally created and saved independently of the document. The owners of the documents being annotated may have no knowledge of the fact that third parties are annotating their documents' contents. When document contents are modified, annotation software faces a difficult situation where annotations need to be reattached. Reattaching annotations in a revised version of a document is a crucial component in annotation system design. Annotation persistence over document versions is a complicated and challenging problem, as documents can go through various changes between versions. In this thesis, we treat annotation persistence over dynamic documents as a specialized information retrieval problem. We then design a scheme to reposition annotations between versions by three mechanisms: the meta-structure information match, the keywords match, and content semantics match.(cont.) Content semantics matching is the determining factor in our annotation persistence scheme design. Latent Semantic Analysis, an innovative information retrieval model, is used to extract and compare document semantics. Two editions of an introductory computer science textbook are used to evaluate the annotation persistence scheme proposed in this study. The evaluation provides substantial evidence that the annotation persistence scheme proposed in this thesis is able to make the right decisions on repositioning annotations based on their degree of modifications, i.e. to reattach annotations if modifications are light, and to orphan annotations if modifications are heavy.by Shaomin Wang.Ph.D