Journal Article

On the fractal patterns of language structures

Bernardes, Américo Tristão, Mello, Heliana, Ribeiro, Leonardo Costa

2023

Overview

Natural Language Processing (NLP) makes use of Artificial Intelligence algorithms to extract meaningful information from unstructured texts, i.e., content that lacks metadata and cannot easily be indexed or mapped onto standard database fields. It has several applications, from sentiment analysis and text summary to automatic language translation. In this work, we use NLP to figure out similar structural linguistic patterns among several different languages. We apply the word2vec algorithm that creates a vector representation for the words in a multidimensional space that maintains the meaning relationship between the words. From a large corpus we built this vectorial representation in a 100-dimensional space for English, Portuguese, German, Spanish, Russian, French, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Italian, Arabic, Hebrew, Basque, Dutch, Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian. Then, we calculated the fractal dimensions of the structure that represents each language. The structures are multi-fractals with two different dimensions that we use, in addition to the token-dictionary size rate of the languages, to represent the languages in a three-dimensional space. Finally, analyzing the distance among languages in this space, we conclude that the closeness there is tendentially related to the distance in the Phylogenetic tree that depicts the lines of evolutionary descent of the languages from a common ancestor.

• Publisher: Public Library of Science,Public Library of Science (PLoS)
• Subject: Algorithms / Analysis / Arabic language / Artificial Intelligence / Basque language / Basque people / Biology and Life Sciences / Chinese languages / Closeness / Computational linguistics / Computer and Information Sciences / Data mining / Descent / Dutch language / Estonian language / Evolution / Finnish language / Fractal geometry / Fractals / French language / Geometry / German language / Hebrew language / Hypotheses / Information processing / Italian language / Japanese language / Korean language / Language / Language contact / Language patterns / Language processing / Language translation / Language usage / Languages / Linguistics / Machine translation / Mathematical functions / Methods / Mutation / Natural history / Natural language interfaces / Natural Language Processing / Philology / Phylogenetics / Phylogeny / Physical Sciences / Portuguese language / Representations / Russian language / Sentiment analysis / Social Sciences / Spanish language / Swedish language / Three dimensional analysis / Translating / Translating and interpreting / Translation / Unstructured data / Word meaning / Words (language)