This paper addresses the problem of deriving distance measures between parent and daughter languages with specific relevance to historical Chinese phonology. The diachronic relationship between the languages is modelled as a Probabilistic Finite State Automaton. The Minimum Message Length principle is then employed to find the complexity of this structure. The idea is that this measure is repre...

Quantifying integrated information is a leading approach towards building a fundamental theory of consciousness. Integrated Information Theory (IIT) has gained attention in this regard due to its theoretically strong framework. However, it faces some limitations such as current state dependence, computationally expensive and inability to be applied to real brain data. On the other hand, Perturb...

For young children, adults learning English, or individuals with language disorders, complex narratives are difficult to create and understand. While narratives can easily be assessed in terms of their lexical and syntactic difficulty, automatically measuring the level of narrative complexity is a challenging problem. We present and evaluate a preliminary system for assessing narrative complexi...

Starting with Bennet and Gill’s seminal paper [13] a whole new research line in complexity theory was opened: the examination of relativized complexity theoretic statements which hold for a measure one set of oracles in the measure defined by putting each string into the oracle with probability 12 independent of all other strings (a formal definition is given below). Bennet and Gill were concer...

We present a measure of string complexity, called I-complexity, computable in linear time and space. It counts the number of different substrings in a given string. The least complex strings are the runs of a single symbol, the most complex are the de Bruijn strings. Although the I-complexity of a string is not the length of any minimal description of the string, it satisfies many basic propert...

We critique the measure of complexity introduced by Shiner, Davison, and Landsberg [Phys. Rev. E 59, 1459 (1999)]. In particular, we point out that it is over universal, in the sense that it has the same dependence on disorder for structurally distinct systems. We then give counterexamples to the claim that complexity is synonymous with being out of equilibrium: equilibrium systems can be struc...