2001/09/12 by Marcelo A. Montemurro, Montemurro, Marcelo A., Damian H. Zanette +1
Computer Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #FOS: Physical sciences #Statistical Mechanics (cond-mat.stat-mech) #cond-mat.stat-mech #cs.CL
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.cond-mat/0109218
9 pages, 5 figures
arxiv created 2001/09/12 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30
Beyond the local constraints imposed by grammar, words concatenated in long sequences carrying a complex message show statistical regularities that may reflect their linguistic role in the message. In this paper, we perform a systematic statistical analysis of the use of words in literary English corpora. We show that there is a quantitative relation between the role of content words in literary English and the Shannon information entropy defined over an appropriate probability distribution. Without assuming any previous knowledge about the syntactic structure of language, we are able to cluster certain groups of words according to their specific role in the text.