2016/10/02 by Kevin Shu, Matilde Marcolli, Shu, Kevin +1
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · #Algorithms and Data Compression #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Error Correcting Code Techniques #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Fractal and DNA sequence analysis
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1610.00311
openalex publication_date 2016/10/02 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We assign binary and ternary error-correcting codes to the data of syntactic structures of world languages and we study the distribution of code points in the space of code parameters. We show that, while most codes populate the lower region approximating a superposition of Thomae functions, there is a substantial presence of codes above the Gilbert-Varshamov bound and even above the asymptotic bound and the Plotkin bound. We investigate the dynamics induced on the space of code parameters by spin glass models of language change, and show that, in the presence of entailment relations between syntactic parameters the dynamics can sometimes improve the code. For large sets of languages and syntactic data, one can gain information on the spin glass dynamics from the induced dynamics in the space of code parameters.