title: Model of the Dynamic Construction Process of Texts and Scaling Laws of Words Organization in Language Systems.
abstract: Scaling laws characterize diverse complex systems in a broad range of fields, including physics, biology, finance, and social science. The human language is another example of a complex system of words organization. Studies on written texts have shown that scaling laws characterize the occurrence frequency of words, words rank, and the growth of distinct words with increasing text length. However, these studies have mainly concentrated on the western linguistic systems, and the laws that govern the lexical organization, structure and dynamics of the Chinese language remain not well understood. Here we study a database of Chinese and English language books. We report that three distinct scaling laws characterize words organization in the Chinese language. We find that these scaling laws have different exponents and crossover behaviors compared to English texts, indicating different words organization and dynamics of words in the process of text growth. We propose a stochastic feedback model of words organization and text growth, which successfully accounts for the empirically observed scaling laws with their corresponding scaling exponents and characteristic crossover regimes. Further, by varying key model parameters, we reproduce differences in the organization and scaling laws of words between the Chinese and English language. We also identify functional relationships between model parameters and the empirically observed scaling exponents, thus providing new insights into the words organization and growth dynamics in the Chinese and English language.
authors.affiliation: Institute for Biomedical Electronics Engineering, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Modern Acoustics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China.
authors.forename: Shan
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Li
authors.affiliation: Institute for Biomedical Electronics Engineering, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Modern Acoustics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China.
authors.forename: Ruokuang
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Lin
authors.affiliation: Institute for Biomedical Electronics Engineering, School of Electronic Science and Engineering, Ministry of Education Key Laboratory of Modern Acoustics, Nanjing University, Nanjing 210093, China.|Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology, Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, United States of America.|Department of Neurology and Program in Neuroscience, Harvard Medical School, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Boston, MA 02215, United States of America.
authors.forename: Chunhua
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Bian
authors.affiliation: Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology, Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, United States of America.|College of Geographic and Biologic Information, Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications, Nanjing 210003, China.|Harvard Medical School and Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA 02115, United States of America.
authors.forename: Qianli D Y
authors.initials: QD
authors.lastname: Ma
authors.affiliation: Keck Laboratory for Network Physiology, Department of Physics, Boston University, Boston, MA 02215, United States of America.|Harvard Medical School and Division of Sleep Medicine, Brigham and Women's Hospital, Boston, MA 02115, United States of America.|Institute of Solid State Physics, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences, Sofia 1784, Bulgaria.
authors.forename: Plamen Ch
authors.identifier: http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7629-762X
authors.initials: PC
authors.lastname: Ivanov
mesh_terms: D044466:Asian People / Q000208:ethnology; D006801:Humans; D007802:Language; D008037:Linguistics; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D013269:Stochastic Processes