Calla G. Beauregard

Ashley M. A. Fehr, Calla G. Beauregard, Julia Witte Zimmerman et al.

Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is through statistical patterns such as Heaps' law, which holds that vocabulary size scales with document length. Little work on Heaps' law has looked at conversation and considered how language features impact scaling. We measure Heaps' law for conversations recorded in two distinct mediums: 1. Strangers brought together on video chat and 2. Fictional characters in movies. We find that scaling of vocabulary size differs by parts of speech. We discuss these findings through behavioral and linguistic frameworks.

Jonathan St-Onge, Ashley M. A. Fehr, Carter Ward et al.

Describing and comparing complex systems requires principled, theoretically grounded tools. Built around the phenomenon of type turbulence, allotaxonographs provide map-and-list visual comparisons of pairs of heavy-tailed distributions. Allotaxonographs are designed to accommodate a wide range of instruments including rank- and probability-turbulence divergences, Jenson-Shannon divergence, and generalized entropy divergences. Here, we describe a suite of programmatic tools for rendering allotaxonographs for rank-turbulence divergence in Matlab, Javascript, and Python, all of which have different use cases.