Paper Info
Title
Criticality in Pareto Optimal Grammars
Abstract
What are relevant levels of description when investigating human language? How are these levels connected to each other? Does one description yield smoothly into the next one such that different models lie naturally along a hierarchy containing each other? Or, instead, are there sharp transitions between one description and the next, such that to gain a little bit accuracy it is necessary to change our framework radically? Do different levels describe the same linguistic aspects with increasing (or decreasing) accuracy? Historically, answers to these questions were guided by intuition and resulted in subfields of study, from phonetics to syntax and semantics. Need for research at each level is acknowledged, but seldom are these different aspects brought together (with notable exceptions). Here, we propose a methodology to inspect empirical corpora systematically, and to extract from them, blindly, relevant phenomenological scales and interactions between them. Our methodology is rigorously grounded in information theory, multi-objective optimization, and statistical physics. Salient levels of linguistic description are readily interpretable in terms of energies, entropies, phase transitions, or criticality. Our results suggest a critical point in the description of human language, indicating that several complementary models are simultaneously necessary (and unavoidable) to describe it.
Year
DOI
Venue
2020
10.3390/e22020165
ENTROPY
Keywords
Field
DocType
syntax,Pareto-optimality,bottleneck method,phase transitions,statistical mechanics
Rule-based machine translation,Information theory,Linguistic description,Mathematical optimization,Phonetics,Theoretical computer science,Hierarchy,Syntax,Semantics,Mathematics,Salient
Journal
Volume
Issue
ISSN
22
2
1099-4300
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
0
0.34
0
Authors
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Luís F. Seoane132.98
Ricard V. Sol2499.46