Manaris B, Pellicoro L, Pothering G, Hodges H "Investigating Esperanto's statistical proportions relative to other languages using neural networks and Zipf's law " Proc Iasted Intl Conf on Artificial Intelligence & Applications : 102-108, 2006

[Eugene Garfield]

Manaris at cs.cofc.edu
idpellic at edisto.cofc.edu
pother at cs.cofc.edu
Hodgesh at cofc.edu


Title: Investigating Esperanto's statistical proportions relative to other
languages using neural networks and Zipf's law

Author(s): Manaris B, Pellicoro L, Pothering G, Hodges H

Source: PROCEEDINGS OF THE IASTED INTERNATIONAL CONFERENCE ON ARTIFICIAL
INTELLIGENCE AND APPLICATIONS : 102-108, 2006

Editor(s): Devedzic V
Document Type: Article
Language: English
Cited References: 20

Conference Information: IASTED International Conference on Artificial
Intelligence and Applications
Innsbruck, AUSTRIA, FEB 13-16, 2006
IASTED

Abstract:
Esperanto is a constructed natural language, which was intended to be an
easy-to-learn lingua franca. Zipf's law models the statistical proportions
of various phenomena in human ecology, including natural languages. Given
Esperanto's artificial origins, one wonders how "natural" it appears,
relative to other natural languages, in the context of Zipf's law. To
explore this question, we collected a total of 283 books from six
languages: English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Esperanto. We
applied Zipf-based metrics on our corpus to extract distributions for word,
word distance, word bigram, word trigram, and word length for each book.
Statistical analyses show that Esperanto's statistical proportions are
similar to those of other languages. We then trained artificial neural
networks (ANNs) to classify books according to language. The ANNs achieved
high accuracy rates (86.3% to 98.6%). Subsequent analysis identified German
as having the most unique proportions, followed by Esperanto, Italian,
Spanish, English, and French. Analysis of misclassified patterns shows that
Esperanto's statistical proportions resemble mostly those of German and
Spanish, and least those of French and Italian.


Addresses: Manaris B (reprint author), Coll Charleston, Dept Comp Sci, 66
George St, Charleston, SC 29424 USA
Coll Charleston, Dept Comp Sci, Charleston, SC 29424 USA

Publisher: ACTA PRESS, BOX 3243 POSTAL STATION B, CALGARY, T2M 4L8, CANADA
IDS Number: BEA05

ISBN: 0-88986-556-6

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