{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/taylors-law-for-human-linguistic-sequences","title":"Taylor's law for Human Linguistic Sequences","arxiv_id":"1804.07893","date":"2018-04-21","proceeding":"ACL 2018 7","authors":["Tatsuru Kobayashi","Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii"],"abstract":"Taylor's law describes the fluctuation characteristics underlying a system in\nwhich the variance of an event within a time span grows by a power law with\nrespect to the mean. Although Taylor's law has been applied in many natural and\nsocial systems, its application for language has been scarce. This article\ndescribes a new quantification of Taylor's law in natural language and reports\nan analysis of over 1100 texts across 14 languages. The Taylor exponents of\nwritten natural language texts were found to exhibit almost the same value. The\nexponent was also compared for other language-related data, such as the\nchild-directed speech, music, and programming language code. The results show\nhow the Taylor exponent serves to quantify the fundamental structural\ncomplexity underlying linguistic time series. The article also shows the\napplicability of these findings in evaluating language models.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1804.07893v2","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1804.07893v2.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"taylors-law-for-human-linguistic-sequences","repo_url":"https://github.com/Group-TanakaIshii/word_taylor","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"time-series-1","task_name":"Time Series"},{"task_slug":"time-series","task_name":"Time Series Analysis"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"syntology_url":null,"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}