IV. Ecosmomics: Independent Complex Network Systems, Computational Programs, Genetic Ecode Scripts

3. Iteracy: A Rosetta Ecosmos Textuality

Drozdz, Stanislaw, et al. Quantifying Origin and Character of Long-Range Correlations in Narrative Texts. Information Sciences. 331/32, 2016. In an analytic survey of over a hundred premier volumes, Polish Academy of Sciences, Jagiellonian University, and Cracow University of Technology complexity theorists find the presence of common, intrinsic, recurrent nonlinear forms and flourishes. A fractal self-similarity, as everywhere else from universe to human, indeed graces the range of historical literature, as the review quote states. See also by this group In Narrative Texts Punctuation Marks Obey the Same Statistics as Words at arXiv:1604.00834.

In natural language using short sentences is considered efficient for communication. However, a text composed exclusively of such sentences looks technical and reads boring. A text composed of long ones, on the other hand, demands significantly more effort for comprehension. Studying characteristics of the sentence length variability (SLV) in a large corpus of world-famous literary texts shows that an appealing and aesthetic optimum appears somewhere in between and involves self-similar, cascade-like alternation of various lengths sentences. An overwhelming majority of the studied texts simply obeys such fractal attributes but especially spectacular in this respect are hypertext-like, stream of consciousness novels. In addition, they appear to develop structures characteristic of irreducibly interwoven sets of fractals called multifractals. (Abstract)

James Joyce, Julio Cortazar, Marcel Proust, Henryk Sienkiewicz and Umberto Eco. Regardless of the language they were working in, some of the world's greatest writers appear to be, in some respects, constructing fractals. Statistical analysis carried out at the Polish Academy of Sciences, however, revealed something even more intriguing. The composition of works from within a particular genre was characterized by the exceptional dynamics of a cascading (avalanche) narrative structure. This type of narrative turns out to be multifractal. That is, fractals of fractals are created. The study involved 113 literary works written in English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian and Spanish by such famous figures as Honore de Balzac, Arthur Conan Doyle, Julio Cortazar, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas, Umberto Eco, George Elliot, Victor Hugo, James Joyce, Thomas Mann, Marcel Proust, Wladyslaw Reymont, William Shakespeare, Henryk Sienkiewicz, JRR Tolkien, Leo Tolstoy and Virginia Woolf, among others. (EurekAlert: Global Source for Science News)

Drozdz, Stanislaw, et al. Quantifying Principles of the Narrative Text Formation. arXiv:1412:8319. Polish systems physicists including Jaroslaw Kwapien find hypertext fractal self-similarities across the historic corpus of written literature, which is seen as isomorphic to neural dynamics. See also by this group Modeling the Average Shortest Path in Growth of Word-Adjacency Networks at arXiv:1409.4714.

Enfield, E. J.. Scale in Language. Cognitive Science. 47/10, 2023. A senior University of Sydney linguist makes another case for an innate complex scalar system essence which suffuses our script and speech. Nested, recursive refrain-like patterns course through writings akin to life’s allometric homologies. See also Complex systems approach to natural language by Tomasz Stanisz, et al Physics Reports. (Vol. 1053, 2024) for an extensive companion view.

A concern of the cognitive science of language has been the concept of a linguistic system. This paper offers a novel approach by identifying *scale* as a mooring for the interdisciplinary study of language systems. It defines scale to be larger or smaller in cases such as a phonemic inventory, a word's frequency in a corpus, or a speaker population. We review linguistic typology, grammatical description, morphosyntactics, psycholinguistics, and social network demography. We turn to sites of scale difference in phonologies, grammatical structure (Menzerath's Law), and in corpora (Zipf's Law). (Abstract)

The language ecology as a distributional network To illustrate, I want to consider a theory that has been successful in accounting for scale dependencies in complex systems outside of language. That observation led (Geoffrey) West and colleagues to develop a theory of allometric scaling founded on three unifying ideas. The first is optimization. Optimization is central to the many forms of balance and trade-off inherent in the patterns of dependency. Second, the delivery system is space-filling. The network must supply its materials to every part of the structure that it serves. For example, in a population-level frame, a language fills a social network. The third principle is invariant terminal functional structure.

In conclusion, this review has argued that if we are going to take seriously the idea that language is a complex system akin to an organism or a city—to take two oft-made comparisons—then we must take seriously the significance of scale.

Eroglu, Sertac. Menzerath-Altmann Law: Statistical Mechanical Interpretation as Applied to a Linguistic Organization. Journal of Statistical Physics. 157/2, 2014. In a contribution to the current synthesis of cosmic nature and human literature, the Eskisehur Osmangazi University, Turkey, biophysicist finds this deep structure of language and script has an accord with a self-organizing physical reality. See Khuram Shahzed, et al herein for more on the law and how it shows up everywhere, and Statistical Mechanics of Ontology Based Annotations by David Hoyle and Andrew Brass at arXiv:1605.05402 about its mathematical basis.

The distribution behavior described by the empirical Menzerath–Altmann law is frequently encountered during the self-organization of linguistic and non-linguistic natural organizations at various structural levels. This study presents a statistical mechanical derivation of the law based on the analogy between the classical particles of a statistical mechanical organization and the distinct words of a textual organization. The derived model allows interpreting the model parameters in terms of physical concepts. We also propose that many organizations presenting the Menzerath–Altmann law behavior, whether linguistic or not, can be methodically examined by the transformed distribution model through the properly defined structure-dependent parameter and the energy associated states. (Abstract)

Eroglu, Sertac. Self-Organization of Genic and Intergenic Sequence Lengths in Genomes: Statistical Properties and Linguistic Coherence. Complexity. Early View June, 2014. In the 21st century and these 2010s, a grand convergence and unification of universe and human is well underway in our midst. In this paper, a Eskisehir Osmangazi University, Turkey, biophysicist, with a 2002 University of Illinois doctorate, provides one of the strongest correlations of the deep affinities between genomes and literature. Might one imagine a “languagome.” As intimated for decades, per the extended quotes, these primary evolutionary codings appear as earlier and later exemplars of a intrinsic natural program. Might we evoke a “naturome” and “cosmome.” What is again being found, as tradition understands, is a greater milieu suffused with text, poetry, legible, edifying script, that humankind might at last decipher and realize is genetic in kind.

In a genome, genes (coding constituents) are interrupted by intergenic regions (noncoding constituents). This study provides a general picture of the large-scale self-organization of coding, noncoding, and total constituent lengths in genomes. Ten model genomes were examined and strong correlations between the number of genomic constituents and the constituent lengths were observed. The analysis was carried out by adopting a linguistic distribution model and a structural analogy between linguistic and genomic constructs. The proposed linguistic-based statistical analysis may provide a fundamental basis for both understanding the linear structural formation of genomic constituents and developing insightful strategies to figure out the function of genic and intergenic regions in genomic sequences. (Abstract)

The proposed analogy between textual sequences and genomic sequences was as follows: Imagine that an organism’s genome serves as a look up table, or vocabulary list in which genomic constituents are considered as distinct words, and an organism’s entire DNA collection corresponds to a large text. One copy of each word (constituent) in this text is found in the look up table (genome) and each word is written using four-letter nucleotide alphabet. Next, suppose that all the constituents with their corresponding lengths in nucleotide count are listed in three categories; coding constituents, noncoding constituents, and total (coding + noncoding) constituents. Creating these categorized genomic constituent lists is analogous to listing a large text’s vocabulary inventory with corresponding lengths in letter count. In this analogy, the DNA to function pathway of an organism can be pictured as though the organism’s genome and the corresponding proteome are the vocabulary lists of two different texts written in two different languages — DNA language and proteinlanguage. The text written in DNA language is translated into the text written in protein language given by the coding, decoding, regulation, and gene expression rules dictated by RNA. The proper usage of the protein language’s distinct words (proteins) in the organismal text generates intended meaning (functions) in that organism. (3)

Esposti, Mirko, et al, eds. Creativity and Universality in Language. Switzerland: Springer International, 2016. In a Lecture Notes in Morphogenesis series, European systems linguists Esposti with coeditors Eduardo Altmann and Francois Pachet report creative consistencies across literary media, broadly conceived, which are then seen to have affinities to physical realms. Some chapters are Statistical Laws in Linguistics, Complexity and Universality in the Long-Range Order of Words, and Computational Approaches to Human Creativity.

This book collects research contributions concerning quantitative approaches to characterize originality and universality in language. Creativity might be considered as a morphogenetic process combining universal features with originality. While quantitative methods applied to text and music reveal universal features of language and music, originality is a highly appreciated feature of authors, composers, and performers. In this framework, the different methods of traditional problems of authorship attribution and document classification provide important insights on how to quantify the unique features of authors, composers, and styles. Such unique features contrast, and are restricted by, universal signatures, such as scaling laws in word-frequency distribution, entropy measures, long-range correlations, among others. Innovation in language becomes relevant when it is imitated and spread to other speakers and musicians. Modern digital databases provide new opportunities to characterize and model the creation and evolution of linguistic innovations on historical time scales, a particularly important example of the more general problem of spreading of innovations in complex social systems.

Ferrer, Ramon, et al. Universality in Syntactic Dependency Networks. Santa Fe Insititute Working Papers. 03-06-042, 2003. The statistical physics of complex networks is applied to various diverse languages to reveal non-trivial patterns such as the small world phenomenon, scaling in the distribution of degrees, which are seen as emergent traits. The website to access these Papers is: www.santafe.edu/sfi/publications.

Our results strongly suggest that existent languages might belong to the same universality class as it is defined in physics. (Abstract)

Ferrer-i-Cancho, Ramon. Statistical Patterns of Human Language in Other Species. Kyoto.evolang.org. (click on Program, then Workshop Proceedings Download) In a paper presented at the 9th international Conference on the Evolution of Language, Kyoto, March 2012, a Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya, (BarcelonaTech), mathematical linguist draws upon a flurry of recent research to reach this grand finding. In addition to every other proportional continuity across Metazoan species and their evolutionary lineage, the same communicative process, in whatever chirp, whistle, grunt, syntactic mode is involved, is instantiated throughout. For a conference summary, see Biology: A Newcomer in Linguistics by Lluis Barcelo-Coblijn in Biological Theory, October, 2012. Could this be, one might add, a singular endeavor for cosmos and life to learn to articulate itself?

Here we will review these discoveries and present the abstract principles of organization that have been put forward to explain their universality beyond human language. (68) In sum, statistical patterns of language offer new prospects for comparative research among species and ground-breaking directions in the quest for true universals of communication and behavior across species. (69) (EvoLang9)

Formentin, Marco, et al. Hidden Scaling Patterns and Universality in Written Communication. arXiv:1311.3601. Posted November, 2013, University of Padova, Dipartimento di Fisica “Galileo Galilei,” contribute to the ready application of the methods of statistical physics to everywhere else across nature and society, in this case even our daily discourse. It is worth noting how often the term “universality” is used nowadays, which would please Galileo for these quantifications indeed imply a mathematical source guiding creation, life, and our human sojourn. For a similar example, see “Of Mice and Men – Universality and Breakdown of Behavioral Organization” by Toru Nakamura, et al in PLoS One (3/4, 2008).

The temporal statistics exhibited by written correspondence appear to be media dependent, with features which have so far proven difficult to characterize. We explain the origin of these difficulties by disentangling the role of spontaneous activity from decision-based prioritizing processes in human dynamics, clocking all waiting times through each agent's `proper time' measured by activity. This unveils the same fundamental patterns in written communication across all media (letters, email, short-text messages), with response times displaying truncated power-law behavior and average exponents near -3/2. When standard time is used, the response time probabilities are theoretically predicted to exhibit a bi-modal character, which is empirically borne out by our new years-long data on email. These novel perspectives on the temporal dynamics of human correspondence should aid in the analysis of interaction phenomena in general, including resource management, optimal pricing and routing, information sharing, emergency handling. (Abstract)

Fortnow, Lance. Computation Is All Around Us and You Can See It if You Try. Quanta. June 12, 2024. The dean of the College of Computing at the Illinois Institute of Technology reflects on years of wondering how to experience and explain an extant, active reality that well seems as the result of a separate domain of immaterial, software-like, informational, maybe linguistic codings.

Do we have a way to manage this randomness and complexity? The recent progress we have seen in AI gives us a glimpse into what it would mean to do just that. Information can be split into a structured part and a random part. Take English for example. There is an underlying complex structure that describes the language, and the sentences that society has produced over time are, in effect, a random sampling from that structure. Recent advances in machine learning have allowed us to take these random samples and recover much of the orderly basics that inform.

I’ve been very lucky. I could build a research career around the machines that encompass the way I feel the world. Whether you hear the music, the algebra, computation, biology, magic, art, or some other way of understanding the world, listen to it. Who knows what secrets you may learn?

Frahm, Klaus and Dima Shepelyansky. Poisson Statistics of PageRank Probabilities of Twitter and Wikipedia Networks. European Physical Journal B. 87/93, 2014. We use this posting by University of Toulouse theorists to gather some papers that convey how quantum phenomena are being found across every natural and social realm, such as “integrable quantum systems” akin to Google dynamics. See also Highlighting Entanglement of Cultures via Ranking of Multilingual Wikipedia Articles by Young-Ho Eom and Shepelyansky (PLoS One), Google Matrix of the Citation Network of Physical Review by Frahm, Eom, Shepelyansky, (Physical Review E), Google Matrix Analysis of C.elegans Neural Network by Vivek Kandiah and Shepelyansky ( Europhysics Letters), and Google Matrix Analysis of DNA Sequences by Kandiah and Shepelyanksy (PLoS One, second quote).

We use the methods of quantum chaos and Random Matrix Theory for analysis of statistical fluctuations of PageRank probabilities in directed networks. In this approach the effective energy levels are given by a logarithm of PageRank probability at a given node. After the standard energy level unfolding procedure we establish that the nearest spacing distribution of PageRank probabilities is described by the Poisson law typical for integrable quantum systems. Our studies are done for the Twitter network and three networks of Wikipedia editions in English, French and German. We argue that due to absence of level repulsion the PageRank order of nearby nodes can be easily interchanged. The obtained Poisson law implies that the nearby PageRank probabilities fluctuate as random independent variables. (Abstract, this paper)

For DNA sequences of various species we construct the Google matrix G of Markov transitions between nearby words composed of several letters. The statistical distribution of matrix elements of this matrix is shown to be described by a power law with the exponent being close to those of outgoing links in such scale-free networks as the World Wide Web (WWW). The spectrum of G is characterized by a large gap leading to a rapid relaxation process on the DNA sequence networks. We introduce the PageRank proximity correlator between different species which determines their statistical similarity from the view point of Markov chains. Our results establish scale-free features of DNA sequence networks showing their similarities and distinctions with the WWW and linguistic networks. (Abstract, K & S)

Fushing, Hsieh, et al. Lewis Carroll’s Doublets Net of English Words: Network Heterogeneity in a Complex System. PLoS One. December,, 2014. UC Davis, and Amsterdam University linguists find written scripts such as this classic work to manifest the same innate geometries and dynamics as everywhere else. May we then surmise that cosmic to human nature is wholly literal and narrative in kind, an edifying genetic testament going forward if we could learn to read?

Lewis Carroll's English word game Doublets is represented as a system of networks with each node being an English word and each connectivity edge confirming that its two ending words are equal in letter length, but different by exactly one letter. We show that this system, which we call the Doublets net, constitutes a complex body of linguistic knowledge concerning English word structure that has computable multiscale features. Distributed morphological, phonological and orthographic constraints and the language's local redundancy are seen at the node level. Phonological communities are seen at the network level. And a balancing act between the language's global efficiency and redundancy is seen at the system level. Because the Doublets net is a modular complex cognitive system, the community geometry and computable multi-scale structural information may provide a foundation for understanding computational learning in many systems whose network structure has yet to be fully analyzed. (Abstract)

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