Zipf's Law and Avoidance of Excessive Synonymy

Manin, D. Yu.

doi:10.1080/03640210802020003

Cited by 62 publications

(70 citation statements)

References 19 publications

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“…At the same time, widely accepted theoretical explanations for Zipf's law are still lacking. As mentioned by Manin [2], "Zipf's law (1949) may be one of the most enigmatic and controversial regularities known in linguistics. It has been alternatively billed as the hallmark of complex systems and dismissed as a mere artifact of data presentation.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phase transitions in least-effort communications

Prokopenko

Obst

et al. 2010

J. Stat. Mech.

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Abstract. We critically examine a model that attempts to explain emergence of power laws (e.g., Zipf's law) in human language. The model is based on the principle of least effort in communications -specifically, the overall effort is balanced between the speaker effort and listener effort, with some trade-off. It has been shown that an information-theoretic interpretation of this principle is sufficiently rich to explain emergence of Zipf's law in the vicinity of the transition between referentially useless systems (one signal for all referable objects) and indexical reference systems (one signal per object). The phase transition is defined in the space of communication accuracy (information content) expressed in terms of the trade-off parameter. Our study explicitly solves the continuous optimisation problem, subsuming a recent, more specific result obtained within a discrete space. The obtained results contrast Zipf's law found by heuristic search (that attained only local minima) in the vicinity of the transition between referentially useless systems and indexical reference systems, with an inverse-factorial (sub-logarithmic) law found at the transition that corresponds to global minima. The inverse-factorial law is observed to be the most representative frequency distribution among optimal solutions.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Phase transitions in least-effort communications

Prokopenko

Obst

et al. 2010

J. Stat. Mech.

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“…O Séaghdha 2007) explicitly design the annotation requirements to strive for a relatively even distribution. Manin (2008) suggests that Zipfian distributions may be a result of the hierarchical nature of the semantic space. This idea builds on an idea referred to by Zipf (1935) as the 'Principle of Least Effort', and later by Grice (1975) as the 'Maxim of Brevity'.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

General and specific paraphrases of semantic relations between nouns

Nulty¹,

Costello²

2013

Nat. Lang. Eng.

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Many English noun pairs suggest an almost limitless array of semantic interpretation. A fruit bowl might be described as a bowl for fruit, a bowl that contains fruit, a bowl for holding fruit, or even (perhaps in a modern sculpture class), a bowl made out of fruit. These interpretations vary in syntax, semantic denotation, plausibility, and level of semantic detail. For example, a headache pill is usually a pill for preventing headaches, but might, perhaps in the context of a list of side effects, be a pill that can cause headaches (Levi, J. N. 1978. The Syntax and Semantics of Complex Nominals. New York: Academic Press.). In addition to lexical ambiguity, both relational ambiguity and relational vagueness make automatic semantic interpretation of these combinations difficult. While humans parse these possibilities with ease, computational systems are only recently gaining the ability to deal with the complexity of lexical expressions of semantic relations. In this paper, we describe techniques for paraphrasing the semantic relations that can hold between nouns in a noun compound, using a semi-supervised probabilistic method to rank candidate paraphrases of semantic relations, and describing a new method for selecting plausible relational paraphrases at arbitrary levels of semantic specification. These methods are motivated by the observation that existing semantic relation classification schemes often exhibit a highly skewed class distribution, and that lexical paraphrases of semantic relations vary widely in semantic precision.

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“…A similar principle is at work in Wittgenstein's version of predicate logic, in which distinct variables are taken to have distinct values [46,48]. 8 From a more empirical perspective, principles such as A5 and A6 seem to be related to linguistic work on language evolution and language acquisition, in which it is often assumed that humans have an (innate) tendency to avoid perfect synonyms as much as possible [6,18,26].…”

Section: Categorical Statements and Subject-negationmentioning

confidence: 97%

Interactively Illustrating the Context-Sensitivity of Aristotelian Diagrams

Demey

2015

Modeling and Using Context

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Abstract. This paper studies the logical context-sensitivity of Aristotelian diagrams. I propose a new account of measuring this type of context-sensitivity, and illustrate it by means of a small-scale example. Next, I turn toward a more large-scale case study, based on Aristotelian diagrams for the categorical statements with subject negation. On the practical side, I describe an interactive application that can help to explain and illustrate the phenomenon of context-sensitivity in this particular case study. On the theoretical side, I show that applying the proposed measure of context-sensitivity leads to a number of precise yet highly intuitive results.

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Zipf's Law and Avoidance of Excessive Synonymy

Cited by 62 publications

References 19 publications

Phase transitions in least-effort communications

Phase transitions in least-effort communications

General and specific paraphrases of semantic relations between nouns

Interactively Illustrating the Context-Sensitivity of Aristotelian Diagrams

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