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

3. Iteracy: A Rosetta Ecosmos Textuality

Li, Yi, et al. Incorporating Textual Network Improves Chinese Stock Market Analysis. Nature Scientific Reviews. 0/20944, 2020. At the close of this year, Shanxi University of Finance and Economics analysts offer another cross-correlation between diverse subject areas. The title network model which is broadly used for literary document analyses is here applied to similarly parse financial stock transactions. But our further interest is to note that nature’s network dynamic geometry can thus be considered to have a literary essence. We log in with Yang-Hui He’s paper Universe as Big Data with generally the same idea.

This study adopts the textual network which describes the coordination where nodes represent words which are connected if they have co-occurrence patterns across documents. To study stock movements, we then propose the sparse laplacian shrinkage logistic model which can take into account the network connectivity structure. By this approach, we studied the relationship between Shenwan index and analysts' research reports. Our study unveils some interesting findings that the efficient use of textual network is important to improve the predictive power as well as the semantic interpretability in stock market analysis. (Abstract)

Lin, Henry and Abraham Loeb. Zipf’s Law from Scale-free Geometry. arXiv:1501.00738. Harvard polymaths perceive a deep affinity across the widest reaches from statistical astrophysics tp urban populations. The work received notice in the January 2016 issue of the MIT Technology Review for its allusion that galaxies and cities self-organize in the same basic way.

The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household (∼10−2 km) to continental (∼104 km) scales. Empirical data indicates simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of cities (known as Zipf's law) and the population density fluctuations as a function of scale. Using techniques from random field theory and statistical physics, we show that these power laws are fundamentally a consequence of the scale-free spatial clustering of human populations and the fact that humans inhabit a two-dimensional surface. In this sense, the symmetries of scale invariance in two spatial dimensions are intimately connected to urban sociology. (Abstract)

Linzen, Tal and Marco Baroni. Syntactic Structure from Deep Learning. Annual Review of Linguistics. Volume 7, January, 2021. We are interested in this contribution by NYU and Facebook AI Research, Paris linguists because it seems to infer that many, widely removed, natural realms under study have a deep language-like essential character and content.

Modern deep neural networks achieve impressive performance in engineering applications that require linguistic skills, such as machine translation. This success has sparked interest in probing whether these models are inducing human-like grammatical knowledge from the raw data they are exposed to and, consequently, whether they can shed light on long-standing debates concerning the innate structure necessary for language acquisition. In this article, we survey the syntactic abilities of deep networks and discuss broader implications that this work has for theoretical linguistics. (Abstract)

Luczak-Roesch, Markus, et al. Not-so-distant Reading: A Dynamic Network Approach to Literature. it – Information Technology. 60/1, 2018. As the revolutionary perception of a common network physiology spreads across every field from quantum to culture, in this de Gruyter journal Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand linguists express how even literary textual works can be found to exhibit this universal interconnectivity.

In this article we report about our efforts to develop and evaluate computational support tools for literary studies. We present a novel method and tool that allows interactive visual analytics of character occurrences in Victorian novels, and has been handed to humanities scholars and students for work with a number of novels from different authors. Our user study reveals insights about Victorian novels that are valuable for scholars in the digital humanities field, and informs UI as well as UX designers about how these domain experts interact with tools that leverage network science. (Abstract)

Malmkjaer, Kirsten and Kevin Windle, eds. Oxford Handbook of Translation Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. Drawing mostly on European linguists, a resource for the historical task of converting text from one language and culture to another, often fraught with difficulty and argument. Of special interest are scriptural tracings - the Christian bible is quite malleable, while the Koran must remain Divinely spoken Arabic.

Manguel, Alberto. A History of Reading. New York: Viking, 1996. As the author’s bio and select quotes help convey, the volume has become an iconic edition, akin to George Steiner’s After Babel and others, about the perennial essence and effinity of universe and human as textual edification and ordained reader. Our sapient proclivity for literary nourishment assumes, as did Hebrew sages, Walt Whitman, and many more herein, a companion, abiding sense of a natural narrative as a numinous enlightenment. As ever and future, the great magnum opus work is to decipher and learn what actual script (and score) a phenomenal human universe is written in. The fourth quote is from an essay on the author’s website, click on Notebook in top row, which further relishes this conversation, but then laments its late digital phase.

Internationally acclaimed as an anthologist, translator, essayist, novelist, and editor, Alberto Manguel is the bestselling author of several award-winning books, including A Dictionary of Imaginary Places and A History of Reading. He was born in Buenos Aires (1948), moved to Canada in 1982 and now lives in France, where he was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre français des Arts et des Lettres. I add that Alberto would also read to Jorges Borges in his waning years. (Amazon)

The universe, in Judaeo-Christian tradition, is conceived of a written Book made from numbers and letters, the key to understanding the universe lies in our ability to read these properly and master their combination, and thereby learn to give life to some part of that colossal text, in imitation of our Maker. (8)

For Walt Whitman, text, number, reader and world mirrored each other in the act of reading, an act whose meaning he expanded until it served to define every vital human activity, as well as the universe in which it all took place. In this conjunction, the reader reflects the writer, the world echoes a book (God’s book, Nature’s book), the book is of flesh and blood, the world is a book to be deciphered. All his life Whitman seems to have sought an understanding and definition of the act of reading, which is both itself and the metaphor for all its parts. (168)

As Dante advances through the three perceptible realms of the Afterlife, the poetic or intellectual image of the world as book becomes more and more concrete, until it takes on what Dante calls “a universal shape,” the shape of a book. For Dante, reaching the final vision in the Empyrean, the ultimate reality is a book. Dante the pilgrim, like a curious and reflective reader, while moving along the road from the first to the last page, allows himself to go back, to retrace explored territory, to recall, foretell and associate events past, present and future, leafing back and forth through God’s book, where “that which in the universe seems separate and scattered” is “gathered and bound by love in one single volume.” Of such convictions are readers and writers made. (Reading the World, 2)

Margalef, Roman. Information Theory and Complex Ecology. Patten, Bernard and Sven Jorgensen, eds. Complex Ecology.. New York: Prentice Hall, 1995. A noted ecologist develops a linguistic model for natural ecosystems. These are seen as analogous to languages, which suggests for our day how nature is truly textual in kind.

Markovic, Rene, et al. Applying Network Theory to Fables: Complexity in Slovene Belles-Lettres. Journal of Complex Networks. 7/1, 2019. University of Maribor, Slovenia theorists including Matjaz Perc show how nature’s common nonlinear geometry and dynamics can even be applied to any corpora of textual literature. And by turns if our conversant and written language are parsable by the same complex network systems as every other realm, it could strongly impart a narrative character to this universe to human procreation. That is to say, an organic doubleness of genomic script and score for this phenotypic genesis becomes increasingly evident.

Words are the building blocks of human communication. They are arranged in sentences in a non-trivial and universal way, which implies the existence of fundamental organizational principles that have shaped language development. One example is Zipf’s law which says that the frequency of word occurrence is generally an inverse power-law function of its rank. In our article, we study the structure and complexity of texts in Slovene belles-lettres, with an emphasis on differences across age groups. We show that the co-occurrence connectivity of words forms a complex and heterogeneous network characterized by an efficient transfer of information. We show that with the increasing age of readers, the length of texts and of words, along with complex social interactions between literary characters, all increase. Taken together, we demonstrate that network theory enables an in-depth theoretical exploration of Slovene belles-lettres, with clear distinctions in statistical properties between age groups, thus bridging art and exact sciences in a mutually rewarding way. (Abstract excerpt)

Martincic-Ipsic, Sanda, et al. Multilayer Network of Language: A Unified Framework for Structural Analysis of Linguistic Subsystems. Physica A. Online April, 2016. With Domagoj Margan and Ana Mestrovic, University of Rijeka, Croatia, informatics researchers post a paper that could be iconic of a worldwide 2010s synthesis. Rijeka is on the Adriatic Sea, proximate to Trieste, Ljubljana, Venice, and more widely Italy, Austria, Bosnia, Serbia. Since 2000, as the 63 references convey, with an Internet resource now accessible everywhere, an historic phase of instant, fluid global collaboration and scientific progress has arisen. Since the Barabasi - Albert 1998 paper upon scale-free networks the ubiquitous presence of dynamic nested systems of nodes, linkages, modules, communities and more has been quantified from cosmic and quantum phases through to brains and cultural civilizations. In this paper, even human literature can be found to exhibit this common topology, which in turn serves to root them in statistical physics.

Recently, the focus of complex networks’ research has shifted from the analysis of isolated properties of a system toward a more realistic modeling of multiple phenomena — multilayer networks. Motivated by the prosperity of multilayer approach in social, transport or trade systems, we introduce the multilayer networks for language. The multilayer network of language is a unified framework for modeling linguistic subsystems and their structural properties enabling the exploration of their mutual interactions. Various aspects of natural language systems can be represented as complex networks, whose vertices depict linguistic units, while links model their relations. The multilayer network of language is defined by three aspects: the network construction principle, the linguistic subsystem and the language of interest. More precisely, we construct a word-level (syntax and co-occurrence) and a subword-level (syllables and graphemes) network layers, from four variations of original text (in the modeled language). The word-level layers share structural properties regardless of the language (e.g. Croatian or English), while the syllabic subword-level expresses more language dependent structural properties. Moreover, the analysis of motifs reveals a close topological structure of the syntactic and syllabic layers for both languages. The findings corroborate that the multilayer network framework is a powerful, consistent and systematic approach to model several linguistic subsystems simultaneously and hence to provide a more unified view on language. (Abstract excerpts)

Massip-Bonet, Angels. Language as a Complex Adaptive System: Towards an Integrative Linguistics. Massip-Bonet, Angels & Albert Bastardas-Boada, eds. Complexity Perspectives on Language, Communication and Society. Berlin: Springer, 2013. The University of Barcelona philologist first reviews the theoretical facets of nonequilibrium dynamics from algorithmic information, autopoiesis and emergence to fractal similarities. Sections go on, among many, to Non-linearity and Phase Transitions� and Parallels between Biological and Language Systems� which considers linguistic genotypes and phenotypes onto cognitive and cultural domains. The grand surmise in this chapter, and the entire book, is a growing realization of the iterative genetic textuality of such a natural genesis uniVerse, from this original, independent drive to biomolecular (epi)genomes and onto equally generative conversation and content.

The objective of the chapter is to promote progress in the formulation and dissemination of transdisciplinary knowledge from the perspective of complexity, with special regard to its application in the field of language, the tool used to convey both thought and method. For this to happen, it is necessary to rethink science, including the human sciences, by means of an approach that cross-cuts disciplines and takes into account all those aspects which will allow us to find a shared language. This is because human phenomena require a way of thinking that is able to account for the interrelated and systematic nature of its internal and external dynamics. The development of a complex perspective will drive us toward a deeper understanding of human phenomena in general since they may well be the most complex in existence. This chapter also aims to set out guidelines for developing a vision of linguistics guided by the perspective of complexity. (Abstract)

Suddenly we can see that shared characteristics exist in complex adaptive systems implicated in processes as diverse as the origin of life, biological evolution, the dynamics of ecosystems, the immune system of mammals, learning and the mental processes of animals and human beings and the evolution of human societies. Comparing these shared characteristics offers us keys to enhancing our understanding of the system that is our object of study. A language is a complex adaptive system. When speaking of a language system, we do not refer only to a language, but also to the communicative exchange, to language as a shaper of cognition, to language as an expression of our nature. (40)

Massip-Bonet, Angels and Albert Bastardas-Boada, eds. Complexity Perspectives on Language, Communication and Society. Berlin: Springer, 2013. Due in January, the editors are a philologist and a sociolinguist at the University of Barcelona. The work, first found on Complexity Digest whose editor Carlos Gershenon contributes an essay, is cited in Rosetta Cosmos because it perceives human cultural discourse as a further manifestation of nature’s universal deployment of self-organizing, complex network systems. Exemplary chapters are “Sociolinguistics: Towards a Complex Ecological View� by Albert Bastardas-Boada, “Self-Organization in Communicating Groups: The Emergence of Coordination, Shared References and Collective Intelligence� by Francis Heylighen (search), “The Emergence of Complexity in Language: An Evolutionary Perspective� by University of Chicago linguist Salikoko Mufwene, and especially Angels Massip-Bonet’s “Language as a Complex Adaptive System: Towards an Integrative Linguistics� (search).

On Springer’s new Free Preview format an Abstract and first pages for each chapter are available, while on Amazon more content pages can be read. And with regard to the general intent of this website, at the close of 2012 might a cumulative, revelatory natural testament at last be open and legible. If such a correspondence exists between human language as grammar and syntax, along with literal script and spoken discourse, with these independent, universal nonlinear sciences as nested complex adaptive systems of agents and interaction, might this collective insight move us closer to and imply Rosetta phases of innate dynamics, procreative genomics, and linguistic repository for our edification and avail?

As the sociologist Norbert Elias pointed out, there is a need of new procedural models to get to grasp the complex functioning of human-beings-in-society. An ecological complexity approach could be useful to advance our knowledge. How can we think of a sociolinguistic “ecosystem�? What elements do we need to put in such an ecosystem and what analogies could be applied? The (bio)ecological inspiration is a metaphorical exercise to proceed toward a more holistic approach in dynamic sociolinguistics. However, a language is not a species and, therefore, we need to make our complex ecology socio-cognitive and multidimensional. We need to create theories and represent to ourselves how language behaviour is woven together with its contexts in order to maintain language diversity and, at the same time, foster general human intercommunication on a planetary scale. (Albert Bastardas-Boada)

Complex adaptive systems consist of a large number of interacting agents. Agents are goal-directed, cognitive individuals capable of perception, information processing and action. However, agents are intrinsically “bounded� in their rational understanding of the system they belong to, and its global organization tends to emerge from local interactions, resulting in a coordination of the agents and their actions. This coordination minimizes conflict or friction, while facilitating cooperation or synergy. The basic mechanism is the reinforcement of synergetic interactions and the suppression of conflictual ones. As a result, the system as a whole starts to behave like an integrated cognitive “superagent�. The author presents several examples of this process of spontaneous coordination that leads to distributed cognition, including the emergence of a shared vocabulary, the development of standard referential expressions, the evolution of transmitted ideas (memes) towards more stereotypical forms, and the aggregation of diverse experiences into collective decisions, in which the system as a whole is more intelligent than its individual components. These phenomena have been investigated by means of multi-agent computer simulations and social psychological experiments. (Francis Heylighen)

Like an increasing number of linguists and other scholars especially interested in the evolution and/or the ontogenetic development of language, the author claims that languages are complex adaptive systems (CAS). These have been characterized as reflecting complex dynamics of interactive agents, experiencing constant instability, and in search for equilibrium in response to changes in the ecologies of their usage. Putatively, thanks to self-organization, transitional moments of apparent stability obtain during which patterns and systems emerge, and evolutions obtain from the alternations of periods of instability and stability in seemingly unpredictable ways. The author addresses the issues of the many interpretations of ‘complexity’ applying to language(s), of the description of the interactive agents that produce the above characteristics, of the emergence of complexity in language(s) from the point of view of language evolution, of the kind(s) of evidence that support(s) the various interpretations of ‘complexity’ that are conceivable, of the way in which complexity in language compares with complexity in other non-linguistic phenomena, and of the causes of the “chaos� which prompts languages to reorganize themselves into new systems. (The Emergence of Complexity in Language: An Evolutionary Perspective, Salikoko Mufwene)

Mehri, Ali and Sahar Mohammadpour Lashkari. Power-Law Regularities in Human Language. European Physical Journal B. 89/241, 2016. Noshirvani University of Technology, Iran, physicists perform an independent analysis of these nonlinear qualities of our sapient writings and conversation to once more affirm the presence of universal patterns. The authors studied range from Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Melville to Darwin, Einstein, (Steven) Weinberg, and Hawking. (I wonder if SW, who claims all is pointless, is aware of an innate mathematics that guides his quill.) See also The Fractal Patterns of Words in a Text (PLoS One, Online June 2015) by the University of Zanjan, Iran, physicists Najafi, Elham Najafi and Amir Darooneh, second Abstract. Compare this work with a concurrent paper from Poland, (search Drozdz) to glimpse a discovery of a textual human uniVerse.

Complex structure of human language enables us to exchange very complicated information. This communication system obeys some common nonlinear statistical regularities. We investigate four important long-range features of human language. We perform our calculations for adopted works of seven famous litterateurs. Zipf’s law and Heaps’ law, which imply well-known power-law behaviors, are established in human language, showing a qualitative inverse relation with each other. Furthermore, the informational content associated with the words ordering, is measured by using an entropic metric. We also calculate fractal dimension of words in the text by using box counting method. The fractal dimension of each word, that is a positive value less than or equal to one, exhibits its spatial distribution in the text. Generally, we can claim that the Human language follows the mentioned power-law regularities. Power-law relations imply the existence of long-range correlations between the word types, to convey an especial idea. (Mehri Abstract)

A text can be considered as a one dimensional array of words. The locations of each word type in this array form a fractal pattern with certain fractal dimension. We observe that important words responsible for conveying the meaning of a text have dimensions considerably different from one, while the fractal dimensions of unimportant words are close to one. We introduce an index quantifying the importance of the words in a given text using their fractal dimensions and then ranking them according to their importance. This index measures the difference between the fractal pattern of a word in the original text relative to a shuffled version. Because the shuffled text is meaningless (i.e., words have no importance), the difference between the original and shuffled text can be used to ascertain degree of fractality. The degree of fractality may be used for automatic keyword detection. Words with the degree of fractality higher than a threshold value are assumed to be the retrieved keywords of the text. (Najafi Abstract)

Finally, the general framework behind our method (automatic keyword extraction) could be extended to explore the hidden secrets of genome, for instance by developing a way for data mining non-coding DNA. (Najafi 16)

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