Browsing by Author "Ferrer Cancho, Ramon"
Now showing items 1-20 of 96
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A commentary on “The now-or-never bottleneck: a fundamental constraint on language”, by Christiansen and Chater (2016)
(RAM-Verlag, 2017-07-02)
Article
Open AccessIn a recent article, Christiansen and Chater (2016) present a fundamental constraint on language, i.e. a now-or-never bottleneck that arises from our fleeting memory, and explore its implications, e.g., chunk-and-pass ... -
A correction on Shiloach's algorithm for minimum linear arrangement of trees
(2017-06-29)
Article
Open AccessMore than 30 years ago, Shiloach published an algorithm to solve the minimum linear arrangement problem for undirected trees. Here we fix a small error in the original version of the algorithm and discuss its effect on ... -
A dependency look at the reality of constituency
(RAM-Verlag, 2018)
Article
Open AccessA comment on “Neurophysiological dynamics of phrase-structure building during sentence processing” by Nelson et al (2017), Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 114(18), E3669-E3678. -
A law of word meaning in dolphin whistle types
(2009-10-30)
Article
Open AccessWe show that dolphin whistle types tend to be used in specific behavioral contexts, which is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphin whistle have some sort of “meaning”. Besides, in some cases, it can be shown that the ... -
A stronger null hypothesis for crossing dependencies
(2014-12-04)
Article
Open AccessThe syntactic structure of a sentence can be modeled as a tree where vertices are words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies between words. It is well known that those edges normally do not cross when drawn over the ... -
Acoustic sequences in non-human animals: a tutorial review and prospectus
(2016-02)
Article
Open AccessAnimal acoustic communication often takes the form of complex sequences, made up of multiple distinct acoustic units. Apart from the well-known example of birdsong, other animals such as insects, amphibians, and mammals ... -
Anti dependency distance minimization in short sequences: A graph theoretic approach
(Informa UK (Taylor & Francis), 2019-08-22)
Article
Restricted access - publisher's policyDependency distance minimization (DDm) is a word order principle favouring the placement of syntactically related words close to each other in sentences. Massive evidence of the principle has been reported for more than a ... -
Are crossing dependencies really scarce?
(2018-03-01)
Article
Open AccessThe syntactic structure of a sentence can be modelled as a tree, where vertices correspond to words and edges indicate syntactic dependencies. It has been claimed recurrently that the number of edge crossings in real ... -
Beyond description: Comment on “Approaching human language with complex networks” by Cong and Liu
(2014-12-01)
Article
Open Access -
Can simple models explain Zipf’s law for all exponents?
(RAM-Verlag, 2005-01)
Article
Open AccessH. Simon proposed a simple stochastic process for explaining Zipf’s law for word frequencies. Here we introduce two similar generalizations of Simon’s model that cover the same range of exponents as the standard Simon ... -
Compression and the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies
(2016-11-01)
Article
Open AccessHere we sketch a new derivation of Zipf's law for word frequencies based on optimal coding. The structure of the derivation is reminiscent of Mandelbrot's random typing model but it has multiple advantages over random ... -
Compression as a universal principle of animal behavior
(Wiley, 2013)
Article
Open AccessA key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have ... -
Constant conditional entropy and related hypotheses
(Institute of Physics (IOP), 2013-07-04)
Article
Open AccessConstant entropy rate (conditional entropies must remain constant as the sequence length increases) and uniform information density (conditional probabilities must remain constant as the sequence length increases) are two ... -
Correlations in the organization of large-scale syntactic dependency networks
(Association for Computational Linguistics, 2007)
Conference report
Open AccessWe study the correlations in the connectivity patterns of large scale syntactic dependency networks. These networks are induced from treebanks: their vertices denote word forms which occur as nuclei of dependency trees. ... -
Crossings as a side effect of dependency lengths
(2016-11-01)
Article
Open AccessThe syntactic structure of sentences exhibits a striking regularity: dependencies tend to not cross when drawn above the sentence. We investigate two competing explanations. The traditional hypothesis is that this trend ... -
Decoding least effort and scaling in signal frequency distributions
(2005-01)
Article
Open AccessHere, assuming a general communication model where objects map to signals, a power function for the distribution of signal frequencies is derived. The model relies on the satisfaction of the receiver (hearer) communicative ... -
Does like seek like? The formation of working groups in a programming project
(Omnia Publisher SL (OmniaScience), 2017-02)
Article
Open AccessIn a course of the degree of computer science, the programming project has changed from individual to teamed work, tentatively in couples (pair programming). Students have full freedom to team up with minimum intervention ... -
Edge crossings in random linear arrangements
(Institute of Physics (IOP), 2020-02-19)
Article
Restricted access - publisher's policyIn spatial networks vertices are arranged in some space and edges may cross. When arranging vertices in a 1D lattice edges may cross when drawn above the vertex sequence as it happens in linguistic and biological networks. ... -
Efficient coding in dolphin surface behavioral patterns
(2009-05)
Article
Open AccessWe show that the law of brevity, i.e. the tendency of words to shorten as their frequency increases, is also found in dolphin surface behavioral patterns. As far as we know, this is the first evidence of the law in another ... -
El bajo rendimiento teórico de los alumnos en asignaturas teórico-prácticas: posibles soluciones
(2010)
Conference lecture
Open AccessEn este trabajo analizamos el rendimiento de los alumnos a lo largo de tres cuatrimestres en la asignatura compiladores de la ingeniería informática. Esta asignatura combina conocimientos teóricos sobre compilación con el ...
