Evaluating the Irregularity of Natural Languages

Candelario Hernández-Gómez,Bibiana Obregón-Quintana,Lev Guzmán-Vargas,Rogelio Basurto-Flores

doi:10.3390/e19100521

Candelario Hernández-Gómez, Bibiana Obregón-Quintana + Show 2 more

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https://doi.org/10.3390/e19100521

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Abstract

In the present work, we quantify the irregularity of different European languages belonging to four linguistic families (Romance, Germanic, Uralic and Slavic) and an artificial language (Esperanto). We modified a well-known method to calculate the approximate and sample entropy of written texts. We find differences in the degree of irregularity between the families and our method, which is based on the search of regularities in a sequence of symbols, and consistently distinguishes between natural and synthetic randomized texts. Moreover, we extended our study to the case where multiple scales are accounted for, such as the multiscale entropy analysis. Our results revealed that real texts have non-trivial structure compared to the ones obtained from randomization procedures.

Highlights

Diverse studies have reported spatio-temporal organization properties in natural languages.Two representative findings of universal features of natural language are the Zipf and Heaps laws, which are based on word frequency and number of different words, respectively [1,2,3,4]
We have presented a modified version of the approximate entropy method which is suitable for the evaluation of irregularities on multiple temporal scales in written texts from natural languages
We described the modified approximate entropy (ApEn) and sample entropy (SampEn) methodologies by considering repetition of patterns subjected to a threshold Hamming distance

Summary

Introduction

Two representative findings of universal features of natural language are the Zipf and Heaps laws, which are based on word frequency and number of different words, respectively [1,2,3,4]. There are restrictions in the order of appearance of bigrams, trigrams and, in general, n-grams; for example, in English and Spanish the letter “q” is always followed by “u”. The way these restrictions and other factors modulate the structure and randomness of the language can be potentially evaluated by means of concepts like entropy, as proposed by Shannon [5,6]

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