On the origin of long-range correlations in texts

作者：Altmann Eduardo G^*; Cristadoro Giampaolo; Esposti Mirko Degli

来源：Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2012, 109(29): 11582-11587.

DOI：10.1073/pnas.1117723109

• complex systems
• language dynamics
• long correlations
• statistical physics
• burstiness

The complexity of human interactions with social and natural phenomena is mirrored in the way we describe our experiences through natural language. In order to retain and convey such a high dimensional information, the statistical properties of our linguistic output has to be highly correlated in time. An example are the robust observations, still largely not understood, of correlations on arbitrary long scales in literary texts. In this paper we explain how long-range correlations flow from highly structured linguistic levels down to the building blocks of a text (words, letters, etc..). By combining calculations and data analysis we show that correlations take form of a bursty sequence of events once we approach the semantically relevant topics of the text. The mechanisms we identify are fairly general and can be equally applied to other hierarchical settings.

• 出版日期2012-7-17