Entropy and type-token ratio in gigaword corpora

There are different ways of measuring diversity in complex systems. In particular, in language, lexical diversity is characterized in terms of the type-token ratio and the word entropy. We here investigate both diversity metrics in six massive linguistic datasets in English, Spanish, and Turkish, co...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Rosillo-Rodes, Pablo, San Miguel, Maxi, Sánchez, David
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Estado:Versión publicada
Fecha de publicación:2025
País:España
Institución:Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC)
Repositorio:DIGITAL.CSIC. Repositorio Institucional del CSIC
OAI Identifier:oai:digital.csic.es:10261/423052
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10261/423052
http://arxiv.org/abs/2411.10227v3
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Complex systems Information & communication theory
Patterns in complex systems
Physics & society
Scaling laws of complex systems
Shannon entropy
Social systems
Descripción
Sumario:There are different ways of measuring diversity in complex systems. In particular, in language, lexical diversity is characterized in terms of the type-token ratio and the word entropy. We here investigate both diversity metrics in six massive linguistic datasets in English, Spanish, and Turkish, consisting of books, news articles, and tweets. These gigaword corpora correspond to languages with distinct morphological features and differ in registers and genres, thus constituting a varied testbed for a quantitative approach to lexical diversity. We unveil an empirical functional relation between entropy and type-token ratio of texts of a given corpus and language, which is a consequence of the statistical laws observed in natural language. Further, in the limit of large text lengths we find an analytical expression for this relation relying on both Zipf and Heaps laws that agrees with our empirical findings.