Zipf’s law revisited: Spoken dialog, linguistic units, parameters, and the principle of least effort

The ubiquitous inverse relationship between word frequency and word rank is commonly known as Zipf’s law. The theoretical underpinning of this law states that the inverse relationship yields decreased effort in both the speaker and hearer, the so-called principle of least effort. Most research has focused on showing an inverse relationship only for written monolog, only for frequencies and ranks of one linguistic unit, generally word unigrams, with strong correlations of the power law to the observed frequency distributions, with limited to no attention to psychological mechanisms such as the principle of least effort. The current paper extends the existing findings, by not focusing on written monolog but on a more fundamental form of communication, spoken dialog, by not only investigating word unigrams but also units quantified on syntactic, pragmatic, utterance, and nonverbal communicative levels by showing that the adequacy of Zipf’s formula seems ubiquitous, but the exponent of the power law curve is not, and by placing these findings in the context of Zipf’s principle of least effort through redefining effort in terms of cognitive resources available for communication. Our findings show that Zipf’s law also applies to a more natural form of communication—that of spoken dialog, that it applies to a range of linguistic units beyond word unigrams, that the general good fit of Zipf’s law needs to be revisited in light of the parameters of the formula, and that the principle of least effort is a useful theoretical framework for the findings of Zipf’s law

Surface and Contextual Linguistic Cues in Dialog Act Classification: A Cognitive Science View

What role do linguistic cues on a surface and contextual level have in identifying the intention behind an utterance? Drawing on the wealth of studies and corpora from the computational task of dialog act classification, we studied this question from a cognitive science perspective. We first reviewed the role of linguistic cues in dialog act classification studies that evaluated model performance on three of the most commonly used English dialog act corpora. Findings show that frequency‐based, machine learning, and deep learning methods all yield similar performance. Classification accuracies, moreover, generally do not explain which specific cues yield high performance. Using a cognitive science approach, in two analyses, we systematically investigated the role of cues in the surface structure of the utterance and cues of the surrounding context individually and combined. By comparing the explained variance, rather than the prediction accuracy of these cues in a logistic regression model, we found that (1) while surface and contextual linguistic cues can complement each other, surface linguistic cues form the backbone in human dialog act identification, (2) with word frequency statistics being particularly important for the dialog act, and (3) the similar trends across corpora, despite differences in the type of dialog, corpus setup, and dialog act tagset. The importance of surface linguistic cues in dialog act classification sheds light on how both computers and humans take advantage of these cues in speech act recognition

Lingualyzer: A computational linguistic tool for multilingual and multidimensional text analysis

Most natural language models and tools are restricted to one language, typically English. For researchers in the behavioral sciences investigating languages other than English, and for those researchers who would like to make cross-linguistic comparisons, hardly any computational linguistic tools exist, particularly none for those researchers who lack deep computational linguistic knowledge or programming skills. Yet, for interdisciplinary researchers in a variety of fields, ranging from psycholinguistics, social psychology, cognitive psychology, education, to literary studies, there certainly is a need for such a cross-linguistic tool. In the current paper, we present Lingualyzer (https://lingualyzer.com), an easily accessible tool that analyzes text at three different text levels (sentence, paragraph, document), which includes 351 multidimensional linguistic measures that are available in 41 different languages. This paper gives an overview of Lingualyzer, categorizes its hundreds of measures, demonstrates how it distinguishes itself from other text quantification tools, explains how it can be used, and provides validations. Lingualyzer is freely accessible for scientific purposes using an intuitive and easy-to-use interface

Research from Sweden and the Netherlands shows that ‘bloc’ politics leads to a greater degree of adversity in legislatures

Proponents of electoral reform in the UK often point to the more consensual nature of democracy in continental European countries as a justification for their position, but this isn’t always the case. For example, as Tom Louwerse, Simon Otjes, David M. Willumsen and Patrik Öhberg show, Sweden’s parliamentarians are notable for their adversarial behaviour when compared to the MPs of the Netherlands. They argue that adversarial ‘bloc’ politics is more likely to lead to adversarial behaviour

Reaching across the aisle:Explaining government–opposition voting in parliament

The divide between government and opposition is clearly visible in the way members of parliament vote, but the variation in government–opposition voting has been left relatively unexplored. This is particularly the case for contextual variation in the extent to which parliamentary voting behaviour follows the government–opposition divide. This article attempts to explain levels of government–opposition voting by looking at three factors: first, the majority status of cabinets (differentiating between majority and minority cabinets), cabinet ideology (differentiating between more centrist and more extremist cabinets) and norms about cabinet formation (differentiating between wholesale and partial alternation in government). The study includes variation at the level of the country, the government and the vote. The article examines voting in the Netherlands (with a history of partial alternation) and Sweden (with a history of wholesale alternation). We find strong support for the effect of cabinet majority status, cabinet ideology and norms about cabinet formation on government–opposition voting

Response Scales in Voting Advice Applications: Do Different Designs Produce Different Outcomes?

Voting Advice Applications (VAAs) represent popular election campaign tools in many countries, enabling voters to discover which party or candidate provides the best match with their political preferences. This article examines the effects of design choices on these tools by focusing on the response scale that is used to measure the policy positions of parties and voters. We analyze the impact of scale length on the advice generated by these tools using user data from a VAA developed for the 2014 Dutch local elections. We transform the original 101-point scale into several alternative scale formats and determine if this leads to a different voting recommendation. We also examine the suitability of alternative scales for creating spatial models, which are often employed by VAAs. We show that the response scale has a potentially profound impact on the resulting advice (with voters receiving different VAA outcomes depending on the scale length), except for voters with an extremist response style. The findings have practical implications for the design of these tools: outcomes should be presented as a preference list, rather than focusing on the “best match.”The Institutions of Politics; Design, Workings, and implications ( do not use, ended 1-1-2020

Measurements of total alkalinity and inorganic dissolved carbon in the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent Southern Ocean between 2008 and 2010

Water column dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity were measured during five hydrographic sections in the Atlantic Ocean and Drake Passage. The work was funded through the Strategic Funding Initiative of the UK's Oceans2025 programme, which ran from 2007 to 2012. The aims of this programme were to establish the regional budgets of natural and anthropogenic carbon in the North Atlantic, the South Atlantic, and the Atlantic sector of the Southern Ocean, as well as the rates of change of these budgets. This paper describes in detail the dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity data collected along east–west sections at 47° N to 60° N, 24.5° N, and 24° S in the Atlantic and across two Drake Passage sections. Other hydrographic and biogeochemical parameters were measured during these sections, and relevant standard operating procedures are mentioned here. Over 95% of dissolved inorganic carbon and total alkalinity samples taken during the 24.5° N, 24° S, and the Drake Passage sections were analysed onboard and subjected to a first-level quality control addressing technical and analytical issues. Samples taken along 47° N to 60° N were analysed and subjected to quality control back in the laboratory. Complete post-cruise second-level quality control was performed using cross-over analysis with historical data in the vicinity of measurements, and data were submitted to the CLIVAR and Carbon Hydrographic Data Office (CCHDO), the Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center (CDIAC) and and will be included in the Global Ocean Data Analyses Project, version 2 (GLODAP 2), the upcoming update of Key et al. (2004)

A realistic, multimodal virtual agent for the healthcare domain

We introduce an interactive embodied conversational agent for deployment in the healthcare sector. The agent is operated by a software architecture that integrates speech recognition, dialog management, and speech synthesis, and is embodied by a virtual human face developed using photogrammetry techniques. These features together allow for real-time, face-to-face interactions with human users. Although the developed software architecture is domain-independent and highly customizable, the virtual agent will initially be applied to healtcare domain. Here we give an overview of the different components of the architecture

Monolithic zirconia single tooth implant-supported restorations with CAD/CAM titanium abutments in the posterior region:A 1-year prospective case series study

PURPOSE: To assess the clinical, radiographic, and patient-reported outcome measures, including the success of screw-retained monolithic zirconia implant-supported restorations with CAD/CAM titanium abutments in the posterior region during a 1-year follow-up. METHODS: In a prospective case series, 50 molar sites in the posterior region of 46 patients with a minimum age of 18 years and sufficient bone volume and anatomical conditions for placing an implant (≥8 mm) and an anatomical restoration were included. Parallel-walled implants with a conical connection were inserted in a two-stage surgical procedure. Implant uncovering and healing abutment placement occurred 12 weeks after insertion. Two weeks after mucosa healing, a screw-retained monolithic zirconia restoration with a CAD/CAM titanium abutment was placed. Clinical, radiographic, and patient-reported outcome measures were collected at baseline before implant placement and then during the 1 month and 1 year follow-ups. RESULTS: At the 1 year follow-up, 49 restorations could be evaluated. The plaque accumulation, presence of calculus, bleeding tendency and peri-implant inflammation indices were low, representing healthy peri-implant conditions. The mean marginal bone level change between the 1 month and the 1 year follow-up was -0.17 ± 0.46 mm. The mean patient satisfaction was high. The restoration success was, according to the modified USPHS criteria, 95.9%. CONCLUSION: Monolithic zirconia implant-supported restorations with CAD/CAM titanium abutments have very good clinical, radiographic and patient-reported outcomes after 1 year in function