BACKGROUND Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication. More recent research has also identified scaling regularities in the dynamics underlying the successive occurrences of events, suggesting the possibility of si...

It is accepted to rank words on absolute (or proportional) frequency, when making frequency lists of words, occuring in the texts. At the same time, the researchers, feeling imperfection of frequency as unconditional indicator of word "importance", consider also other characteristics of usage for revealing the basic zone of frequency list, for example the range, i.e. the number of categories, i...

We present a graph-based approach to discover and extend semantic relationships found in a mathematics curriculum to more general network structures that can illuminate relationships within the instructional material. Using words representative of a secondary level mathematics curriculum we identified in separate work, we constructed two similarity networks of word problems in a mathematics tex...