311 research outputs found
Acoustic sequences in non-human animals : a tutorial review and prospectus
No full textAnimal acoustic communication often takes the form of complex sequences, made up of multiple distinct acoustic units. Apart from the well-known example of birdsong, other animals such as insects, amphibians,and mammals (including bats, rodents, primates, and cetaceans) also generate complex acoustic sequences. Occasionally, such as with birdsong, the adaptive role of these sequences seems clear (e.g. mate attraction and territorial defence). More often however, researchers have only begun to characterise – let alone understand – the significance and meaning of acoustic sequences. Hypotheses abound, but there is little agreement as to how sequences should be defined and analysed. Our review aims to outline suitable methods for testing these hypotheses, and to describe the major limitations to our current and near-future knowledge on questions of acoustic sequences. This review and prospectus is the result of a collaborative effort between 43 scientists from the fields of animal behaviour, ecology and evolution, signal processing, machine learning,quantitative linguistics, and information theory, who gathered for a 2013 workshop entitled, ‘Analysing vocal sequences in animals’. Our goal is to present not just a review of the state of the art, but to propose a methodological framework that summarises what we suggest are the best practices for research in this field,across taxa and across disciplines. We also provide a tutorial-style introduction to some of the most promising algorithmic approaches for analysing sequences. We divide our review into three sections: identifying the distinct units of an acoustic sequence, describing the different ways that information can be contained within a sequence, and analysing the structure of that sequence. Each of these sections is further subdivided to address the key questions and approaches in that area. We propose a uniform, systematic, and comprehensive approach to studying sequences, with the goal of clarifying research terms used in different fields, and facilitating collaboration and comparative studies. Allowing greater interdisciplinary collaboration will facilitate the investigation of many important questions in the evolution of communication and sociality.Peer reviewe
Replication Data for: Memory limitations are hidden in grammar
No full textThis dataset contains the replication data for the article:
Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Morten H. Christiansen & Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho (2019). Memory limitations are hidden in grammar, under review.
See readme.txt file
Replication Data for: Memory limitations are hidden in grammar
No full textThis dataset contains the replication data for the article:
Carlos Gómez-Rodríguez, Morten H. Christiansen & Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho (2019). Memory limitations are hidden in grammar, under review.
See readme.txt file
Swap distance minimization in SOV languages
No full textThis the repository for the article:
Ferrer-i-Cancho, R & Namboodiripad, S (2023). Swap distance minimization in SOV languages. Cognitive and mathematical foundations
Swap distance minimization in SOV languages
No full textThis the repository for the article:
Ferrer-i-Cancho, R & Namboodiripad, S (2023). Swap distance minimization in SOV languages. Cognitive and mathematical foundations
Sobre la singularitat del llenguatge humà
No full textAquest treball ha obtingut el V Premi de Comunicació Científica Joan Lluís Vives en la modalitat de ciències básiques, ciències de la salut, arquitectures i enginyeries. L'autor, Ramon Ferrer, que actualment treballa a la universitat La Sapienza de Roma, explica la seva tesi doctoral, presentada a la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Ferrer es pregunta si hi ha cap tret distintiu dels humans i respon que el que més s'acosta és la recursivitat del llenguatge, però matissa que els dofins potser ens priven de l'exclusivitat també en aquesta matèria.Postprint (author's final draft
Sobre la singularitat del llenguatge humà
No full textAquest treball ha obtingut el V Premi de Comunicació Científica Joan Lluís Vives en la modalitat de ciències básiques, ciències de la salut, arquitectures i enginyeries. L'autor, Ramon Ferrer, que actualment treballa a la universitat La Sapienza de Roma, explica la seva tesi doctoral, presentada a la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Ferrer es pregunta si hi ha cap tret distintiu dels humans i respon que el que més s'acosta és la recursivitat del llenguatge, però matissa que els dofins potser ens priven de l'exclusivitat també en aquesta matèria.Postprint (author's final draft
Sobre la singularitat del llenguatge humà
No full textAquest treball ha obtingut el V Premi de Comunicació Científica Joan Lluís Vives en la modalitat de ciències básiques, ciències de la salut, arquitectures i enginyeries. L'autor, Ramon Ferrer, que actualment treballa a la universitat La Sapienza de Roma, explica la seva tesi doctoral, presentada a la Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya. Ferrer es pregunta si hi ha cap tret distintiu dels humans i respon que el que més s'acosta és la recursivitat del llenguatge, però matissa que els dofins potser ens priven de l'exclusivitat també en aquesta matèria
Human language through the lens of large word co-occurrence networks
No full textWe review the article by Ferrer-i-Cancho & Solé (2001) on the word co-occurrence networks of the British National Corpus, improving it and expanding it in multiple directions. First, we replace the statistically flawed criterion to filter out non-statistically significant co-occurrences by a new method that is a combination of Fisher's Exact Test and a Holm-Bonferroni's Correction to control for multiple comparisons. Second, we introduce new measures such as closeness centrality to measure vertex-vertex distance and we discover that significant co-occurrences reported by our method are mostly composed by words with larger centrality. Also we study the degree mixing of the network using the mixing coefficient, defined by Newman, to determine the disassortative nature of the words in the corpus. Third, we study common phenomena over word co-occurrence networks, like the small-world condition and the emergence of Zipf's Law. We discover that networks whose non-significant co-occurrences are filtered out lose the condition of small-world, while non-filtered networks exhibit it, but for both of them we find a double Zipf's Law with different exponents for the regimes in the degree distribution. Fourth, we investigate the effect of randomizing the corpus and the significance level on the properties of the network. We find that the original filtering technique is not able to determine a lack of significance in word co-occurrences from a randomized corpus. Also, we add a discussion on the significance level we have used for the filtering, such that it has an impact on the different properties exhibited by the resulting network after the filtering. To conclude, we try to tie the results from our analysis to human language phenomena, like the existence of two different registries in human language to achieve a successful communication, as reported by Ferrer-i-Cancho
Human language through the lens of large word co-occurrence networks
No full textWe review the article by Ferrer-i-Cancho & Solé (2001) on the word co-occurrence networks of the British National Corpus, improving it and expanding it in multiple directions. First, we replace the statistically flawed criterion to filter out non-statistically significant co-occurrences by a new method that is a combination of Fisher's Exact Test and a Holm-Bonferroni's Correction to control for multiple comparisons. Second, we introduce new measures such as closeness centrality to measure vertex-vertex distance and we discover that significant co-occurrences reported by our method are mostly composed by words with larger centrality. Also we study the degree mixing of the network using the mixing coefficient, defined by Newman, to determine the disassortative nature of the words in the corpus. Third, we study common phenomena over word co-occurrence networks, like the small-world condition and the emergence of Zipf's Law. We discover that networks whose non-significant co-occurrences are filtered out lose the condition of small-world, while non-filtered networks exhibit it, but for both of them we find a double Zipf's Law with different exponents for the regimes in the degree distribution. Fourth, we investigate the effect of randomizing the corpus and the significance level on the properties of the network. We find that the original filtering technique is not able to determine a lack of significance in word co-occurrences from a randomized corpus. Also, we add a discussion on the significance level we have used for the filtering, such that it has an impact on the different properties exhibited by the resulting network after the filtering. To conclude, we try to tie the results from our analysis to human language phenomena, like the existence of two different registries in human language to achieve a successful communication, as reported by Ferrer-i-Cancho
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