Abstract
Part II mainly considers the characteristics of a population of linguistic elements, such as words. A word has a frequency in a text, and the vocabulary of the text forms a population, which this part analyzes.
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Change history
29 November 2022
The original version of the chapter “Language as a Complex System” was previously published without updating missing reference in footnote 4, page 22. This change has now been included and the chapter and the book have been updated with the change.
Notes
- 1.
Others, such as Ferrer-i-Cancho and Elvevåg (2010), previously indicated such differences between some of the simplest random texts and the original text. The population of monkey text can also be shown to differ from that of natural language text by different ways from those used in these previous works, as shown later in this chapter, in Chaps. 6 and 13. It is important to know first, however, that monkey texts analytically produce a power law.
- 2.
Chapter 21.1 defines measures for the goodness of fit, which depend on the fitting method. For the maximum-likelihood method, the goodness of fit is primarily measured by the value of the negative log-likelihood, LL. In the case of Moby Dick, LL = 6.692 for η = 1.037. At this point, we can only say that, for Moby Dick, the plot is pretty straight, and the fit is therefore good. Section 5.1 will compare these values across different datasets. The rest of the book gives measures indicating the goodness of fit in the footnotes.
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Tanaka-Ishii, K. (2021). Relation Between Rank and Frequency. In: Statistical Universals of Language. Mathematics in Mind. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-59377-3_4
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