Words follow the law of brevity, i.e. more frequent words tend to be shorter. From a statistical point of view, this qualitative definition of the law states that word length and word frequency are negatively correlated. Here the recent finding of patterning consistent with the law of brevity in Formosan macaque vocal communication (Semple et al., 2010) is revisited. It is shown that the negati...

A PET (positron emission tomography) activation study using word-fluency tasks was administered to i dentify the network for word retrieval and speech production, and to explore mechanisms for word finding difficulty observed in elderly people. It was found that the left anterior insula, as opposed to Broca’s area, left premotor area, the anterior cingulate gyrus, thalamus, basal ganglia, midbr...

Eye movements were recorded during the reading of long words presented in isolation. Overall, the decision to refixate was found to depend on both length and frequency of the word, while refixation amplitude depended only on word length. This finding corroborates the assumption that most refixation saccades are preplanned on the basis of the parafoveal word length. However, cancellation of such...

Recent advances in word sense induction rely on clustering related words. In this paper, instead of using a clustering algorithm, we suggest to perform a Singular Value Decomposition (SVD) which can be guaranteed to always find a global optimum. However, in order to apply this method to the problem of word sense induction, a semantic interpretation of the dimensions computed by the SVD is requi...

Chinese is written without word delimiters so word segmentation is generally considered a key step in processing Chinese texts. This paper presents a new statistical approach to segment Chinese sequences into words based on contextual entropy on both sides of a bigram. It is used to capture the dependency with the left and right contexts in which a bigram occurs. Our approach tries to segment b...

This paper presents search methods to optimize word-length for digital systems. Finding the word-length is tedious work when the variables for optimization are numerous. We have proposed sequential and preplanned searches to find out optimum wordlength, and compared them in terms of the trials. A comparison for a given optimized point is evaluated. We apply them to word-length optimization for ...

This article presents a method of word sense disambiguation that assigns a target word the sense that is most related to the senses of its neighboring words. We explore the use of measures of similarity and relatedness that are based on finding paths in a concept network, information content derived from a large corpus, and word sense glosses. We observe that measures of relatedness are useful ...

Current state-of-the-art Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) algorithms are mostly supervised and use the P (Sense|Word) statistic for annotation. This P (Sense|Word) statistic is obtained after training the model on an annotated corpus. The performance of WSD algorithms do not match the efficiency and quality of human annotation. It is therefore important to know the role of the contextual clues i...

The word length effect, the finding that words that have fewer syllables are recalled better than otherwise comparable words that have more syllables, is one of the benchmark effects that must be accounted for in any model of serial recall, and simulation models of immediate memory rely heavily on the finding. However, previous research has shown that the effect disappears when participants are...

A word w is extending a subset of states S of a deterministic finite automaton, if the set of states mapped to S by w (the preimage of S under the action of w) is larger than S. This notion together with its variations has particular importance in the field of synchronizing automata, where a number of methods and algorithms rely on finding (short) extending words. In this paper we study the com...