42 research outputs found
On Hilberg's Law and Its Links with Guiraud's Law
Hilberg (1990) supposed that finite-order excess entropy of a random human
text is proportional to the square root of the text length. Assuming that
Hilberg's hypothesis is true, we derive Guiraud's law, which states that the
number of word types in a text is greater than proportional to the square root
of the text length. Our derivation is based on some mathematical conjecture in
coding theory and on several experiments suggesting that words can be defined
approximately as the nonterminals of the shortest context-free grammar for the
text. Such operational definition of words can be applied even to texts
deprived of spaces, which do not allow for Mandelbrot's ``intermittent
silence'' explanation of Zipf's and Guiraud's laws. In contrast to
Mandelbrot's, our model assumes some probabilistic long-memory effects in human
narration and might be capable of explaining Menzerath's law.Comment: To appear in Journal of Quantitative Linguistic
The challenges of statistical patterns of language: the case of Menzerath's law in genomes
The importance of statistical patterns of language has been debated over
decades. Although Zipf's law is perhaps the most popular case, recently,
Menzerath's law has begun to be involved. Menzerath's law manifests in
language, music and genomes as a tendency of the mean size of the parts to
decrease as the number of parts increases in many situations. This statistical
regularity emerges also in the context of genomes, for instance, as a tendency
of species with more chromosomes to have a smaller mean chromosome size. It has
been argued that the instantiation of this law in genomes is not indicative of
any parallel between language and genomes because (a) the law is inevitable and
(b) non-coding DNA dominates genomes. Here mathematical, statistical and
conceptual challenges of these criticisms are discussed. Two major conclusions
are drawn: the law is not inevitable and languages also have a correlate of
non-coding DNA. However, the wide range of manifestations of the law in and
outside genomes suggests that the striking similarities between non-coding DNA
and certain linguistics units could be anecdotal for understanding the
recurrence of that statistical law.Comment: Title changed, abstract and introduction improved and little
corrections on the statistical argument
VIII. Le Ve Congrès de psychologie expérimentale (Berlin, 16-19 avril 1912)
Menzerath Paul. VIII. Le Ve Congrès de psychologie expérimentale (Berlin, 16-19 avril 1912). In: L'année psychologique. 1912 vol. 19. pp. 236-256
VIII. Le Ve Congrès de psychologie expérimentale (Berlin, 16-19 avril 1912)
Menzerath Paul. VIII. Le Ve Congrès de psychologie expérimentale (Berlin, 16-19 avril 1912). In: L'année psychologique. 1912 vol. 19. pp. 236-256
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Le témoignage des normaux et des aliénés: rapport du IIIe Congrès international de neurologie et de psychiatrie, Gand, 20-26 août 1913
info:eu-repo/semantics/publishe