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Quantifying Evolution of Short and Long-Range Correlations in Chinese Narrative Texts across 2000 Years

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  • Heng Chen
  • Haitao Liu

Abstract

We investigate how short and long-range word length correlations evolve in Chinese narrative texts. The results show that, for short-range word length correlations, no significant linear evolutionary trend was found. But for long-range correlations, there are two opposite tendencies for two different regimes: the Hurst exponent of small-scale (box size ranges from 10 to 100) word length correlations decreases over time, and the exponent of large-scale (box size ranges from 101 to 1000) shows an increasing tendency. The increase of word length is corroborated as an essential regularity of word evolution in written Chinese. Further analyses show that a significant correlation coefficient is obtained between Hurst exponents from the small-scale correlations and mean word length across time. These indicate that word length correlation evolution possesses different self-adaptive mechanisms in terms of different scales of distances between words. We speculate that the increase of word length and sentence length in written Chinese may account for this phenomenon, in terms of both the social-cultural aspects and the self-adapting properties of language structures.

Suggested Citation

  • Heng Chen & Haitao Liu, 2018. "Quantifying Evolution of Short and Long-Range Correlations in Chinese Narrative Texts across 2000 Years," Complexity, Hindawi, vol. 2018, pages 1-12, February.
    • Handle: RePEc:hin:complx:9362468
    DOI: 10.1155/2018/9362468
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Heng Chen & Junying Liang & Haitao Liu, 2015. "How Does Word Length Evolve in Written Chinese?," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(9), pages 1-12, September.
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    3. Tianguang Yang & Changgui Gu & Huijie Yang, 2016. "Long-Range Correlations in Sentence Series from A Story of the Stone," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(9), pages 1-11, September.
    4. Ebeling, Werner & Neiman, Alexander, 1995. "Long-range correlations between letters and sentences in texts," Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, Elsevier, vol. 215(3), pages 233-241.
    5. Marcelo A Montemurro & Damián H Zanette, 2011. "Universal Entropy of Word Ordering Across Linguistic Families," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 6(5), pages 1-9, May.
    6. Bhan, Jaemi & Kim, Sowoon & Kim, Jongkwang & Kwon, Younghun & Yang, Sung-il & Lee, Kunsang, 2006. "Long-range correlations in Korean literary corpora," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 29(1), pages 69-81.
    7. Şahin, Gökhan & Erentürk, Murat & Hacinliyan, Avadis, 2009. "Detrended fluctuation analysis in natural languages using non-corpus parametrization," Chaos, Solitons & Fractals, Elsevier, vol. 41(1), pages 198-205.
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