dc.contributor
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament de Ciències de la Computació
dc.contributor
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Institut de Ciències de l'Educació
dc.contributor
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. LARCA - Laboratori d'Algorísmia Relacional, Complexitat i Aprenentatge
dc.contributor
Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. GPLN - Grup de Processament del Llenguatge Natural
dc.contributor.author
Casas Fernández, Bernardino
dc.contributor.author
Hernández Fernández, Antonio
dc.contributor.author
Catala Roig, Neus
dc.contributor.author
Ferrer Cancho, Ramon
dc.contributor.author
Baixeries i Juvillà, Jaume
dc.date.issued
2019-11-01
dc.identifier
Casas, B. [et al.]. Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language. "Computer speech and language", 1 Novembre 2019, vol. 58, p. 19-50.
dc.identifier
https://hdl.handle.net/2117/134935
dc.identifier
10.1016/j.csl.2019.03.007
dc.description.abstract
The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf’s law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that have been studied less intensively: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. In a previous work, we tested the robustness of these Zipfian laws for English, roughly measuring word length in number of characters and distinguishing adult from child speech. In the present article, we extend our study to other languages (Dutch and Spanish) and introduce two additional measures of length: syllabic length and phonemic length. Our correlation analysis indicates that both the meaning-frequency law and the law of abbreviation hold overall in all the analyzed languages.
dc.description.abstract
Peer Reviewed
dc.description.abstract
Postprint (author's final draft)
dc.format
application/pdf
dc.relation
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885230817300414
dc.relation
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/MINECO/TIN2016-77820-C3-3-R
dc.relation
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/MINECO//TIN2014-57226-P/ES/APRENDIZAJE COMPUTACIONAL Y COMUNICACION/
dc.relation
info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/AEI/Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2013-2016/TIN2017-89244-R/ES/GESTION Y ANALISIS DE DATOS COMPLEJOS/
dc.rights
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/
dc.rights
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Spain
dc.subject
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Aplicacions de la informàtica
dc.subject
Language and languages
dc.subject
Word frequency
dc.subject
Lingüística comparada
dc.subject
Llenguatge i llengües
dc.title
Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language
