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oai:recercat.cat:2117/1349352026-01-18T06:13:19Zcom_2072_1033col_2072_452950

Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language Casas Fernández, Bernardino Hernández Fernández, Antonio Catala Roig, Neus Ferrer Cancho, Ramon Baixeries i Juvillà, Jaume Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Departament de Ciències de la Computació Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Institut de Ciències de l'Educació Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. LARCA - Laboratori d'Algorísmia Relacional, Complexitat i Aprenentatge Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. GPLN - Grup de Processament del Llenguatge Natural Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Aplicacions de la informàtica Semantics Language and languages Zipf’s laws Polysemy Brevity Word frequency Semàntica Lingüística comparada Llenguatge i llengües The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf’s law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that have been studied less intensively: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. In a previous work, we tested the robustness of these Zipfian laws for English, roughly measuring word length in number of characters and distinguishing adult from child speech. In the present article, we extend our study to other languages (Dutch and Spanish) and introduce two additional measures of length: syllabic length and phonemic length. Our correlation analysis indicates that both the meaning-frequency law and the law of abbreviation hold overall in all the analyzed languages. Peer Reviewed Postprint (author's final draft) 2019-11-01 Article Casas, B. [et al.]. Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language. "Computer speech and language", 1 Novembre 2019, vol. 58, p. 19-50. 0885-2308 https://hdl.handle.net/2117/134935 10.1016/j.csl.2019.03.007 eng https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0885230817300414 info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/MINECO/TIN2016-77820-C3-3-R info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/MINECO//TIN2014-57226-P/ES/APRENDIZAJE COMPUTACIONAL Y COMUNICACION/ info:eu-repo/grantAgreement/AEI/Plan Estatal de Investigación Científica y Técnica y de Innovación 2013-2016/TIN2017-89244-R/ES/GESTION Y ANALISIS DE DATOS COMPLEJOS/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ Open Access Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Spain 32 p. application/pdf Elsevier