Download Free Language As Choice And Chance Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Language As Choice And Chance and write the review.

In trying to give an account of the statistical properties of language, one is faced with the problem of having to find the common thread which would show the many and multifarious forms of language statistic- embodied in scattered papers written by linguists, philosophers, mathe maticians, engineers, each using his own professional idiom - as belong ing to one great whole: quantitative linguistics. This means that the investigator has to find the system of this branch of science which would enable him to arrange the vast material in an orderly fashion, and present it as an organic whole. Such a system is conceived in this book, as comprising the following disciplines as the four main branches of literary statistics: Statistical Linguistics, Stylostatistics, Optimal Systems of Language Structure, and Linguistic Duality (Parts I-IV). The Introduction is meant to define the position of the book with regard to both, linguistics and statistics.
This volume explores the universal mathematical properties underlying big language data and possible reasons why such properties exist, revealing how we may be unconsciously mathematical in our language use. These properties are statistical and thus different from linguistic universals that contribute to describing the variation of human languages, and they can only be identified over a large accumulation of usages. The book provides an overview of state-of-the art findings on these statistical universals and reconsiders the nature of language accordingly, with Zipf's law as a well-known example. The main focus of the book further lies in explaining the property of long memory, which was discovered and studied more recently by borrowing concepts from complex systems theory. The statistical universals not only possibly lie as the precursor of language system formation, but they also highlight the qualities of language that remain weak points in today's machine learning. In summary, this book provides an overview of language's global properties. It will be of interest to anyone engaged in fields related to language and computing or statistical analysis methods, with an emphasis on researchers and students in computational linguistics and natural language processing. While the book does apply mathematical concepts, all possible effort has been made to speak to a non-mathematical audience as well by communicating mathematical content intuitively, with concise examples taken from real texts.