Tzay-Ming Hong

Ping-Rui Tsai, Yen-Ting Chou, Nathan-Christopher Wang et al.

Music, enchanting and poetic, permeates every corner of human civilization. Although music is not unfamiliar to people, our understanding of its essence remains limited, and there is still no universally accepted scientific description. This is primarily due to music being regarded as a product of both reason and emotion, making it difficult to define. In this article, we focus on the fundamental elements of music and construct an evolutionary network from the perspective of music as a natural language, aligning with the statistical characteristics of texts. Through this approach, we aim to comprehend the structural differences in music across different periods, enabling a more scientific exploration of music. Relying on the advantages of structuralism, we can concentrate on the relationships and order between the physical elements of music, rather than getting entangled in the blurred boundaries of science and philosophy. The scientific framework we present not only conforms to past conclusions in music, but also serves as a bridge that connects music to natural language processing and knowledge graphs.

Ping-Rui Tsai, Chi-hsiang Wang, Yu-Cheng Liao et al.

Images, as a product evolving alongside civilization, develop similarly to natural languages with the advancement of civilization. Not only are images abundant in daily life, but are also influenced by technology in shaping their forms, embodying various characteristics as they evolve in time. Language is a sequence of symbols that represents thoughts. While a written language is typically associated with the close integration of text and sound, as a combination of visual symbols and perception, the communicative power of image is no less significant. This is especially notable since 60% of the sensory input received by our central nervous system comes from vision. Given the symbolic system inherent in images, we are curious whether images can also exhibit the laws of statistical linguistics. To explore this, we begin with the relationship between human thought and visual perception to decode how images are formed by the latter mechanism. Building upon previous studies that established the high correlation between pre-trained deep convolutional neural networks and the human visual system, we use the VGG-19 to define words via each kernel and calculate the number of pixels with grayscale values greater than 90%. By (a) ranking words frequency, (b) randomizing the order of kernel appearances and performing the same word count accumulation, and (c) summing the word counts layer by layer, we are surprised to find that Zipf's, Heaps', and Benford's laws of statistical linguistics also exist in the words that comprises the text representing different images.

Li-Min Wang, Hsing-Yi Lai, Sun-Ting Tsai et al.

Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein linguistics, dictionary, Grammar of pro_dom, complexity, genomics_nlp, InterPro, language modeling, Protein language modeling} provide a computational foundation for characterizing and analyzing protein sequences, human corpora, and their evolution. However, no general mathematical formula has been proposed so far to illuminate the origin of quantitative hallmarks shared by life and language. Here we show several new statistical relationships shared by proteins and words, which inspire us to establish a general mechanism of evolution with explicit formulations that can incorporate both old and new characteristics. We found natural selection can be quantified via the entropic formulation by the principle of least effort to determine the sequence variation that survives in evolution. Besides, the origin of power law behavior and how changes in the environment stimulate the emergence of new proteins and words can also be explained via the introduction of function connection network. Our results demonstrate not only the correspondence between genetics and linguistics over their different hierarchies but also new fundamental physical properties for the evolution of complex adaptive systems. We anticipate our statistical tests can function as quantitative criteria to examine whether an evolution theory of sequence is consistent with the regularity of real data. In the meantime, their correspondence broadens the bridge to exchange existing knowledge, spurs new interpretations, and opens Pandora's box to release several potentially revolutionary challenges. For example, does linguistic arbitrariness conflict with the dogma that structure determines function?

Li-Min Wang, Sun-Ting Tsai, Shan-Jyun Wu et al.

One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that highlights the equally important role of syllables, which is complementary to Zipf's. By plotting rank-rank frequency distribution of word and syllable for English and Chinese corpora, visible lines appear and can be fit to a master curve. We discover the multi-layer network for words and syllables based on this analysis exhibits the feature of self-organization which relies heavily on the inclusion of syllables and their connections. Analytic form for the scaling structure is derived and used to quantify how Internet slang becomes fashionable, which demonstrates its usefulness as a new tool to evolutionary linguistics.