We are pleased to invite you to the following Modern Trends in Physics Research (MTPR) seminar, which will be held on May 20 at 13:00 in the Prof. Arkadiusz Piekara Auditorium, Collegium Physicum.
Speaker: Prof. Stanisław Dróżdż
Institute of Nuclear Physics PAN and Cracow University of Technology, Cracow, Poland
Will speak about: Natural language as complex adoptive system
Abstract: Natural language is one of the most intricate manifestations of complexity in human culture and can be viewed as a complex adaptive
system emerging from interactions among large communities of speakers and writers. Although built from simple elements such as words,
characters, and punctuation marks, it generates hierarchical structures capable of expressing virtually unlimited meanings. Recent advances in
statistical physics, nonlinear dynamics, and network science reveal that language exhibits many properties characteristic of complex adaptive
systems, including long-range correlations, scale invariance, fractal organization, self-organization, and emergent network topology. This
seminar discusses quantitative approaches to language complexity, focusing on three interconnected aspects: correlation structure in
textual sequences, statistical regularities of punctuation, and network representations of linguistic organization. Particular attention is devoted to the role of punctuation marks, whose distributions and correlations display remarkable universality across languages and contribute significantly to the global organization of texts. The seminar also presents how word- and punctuation-based networks capture structural properties such as small-world and scale-free organization. Finally, implications for contemporary natural language processing and large language models are discussed, emphasizing how insights into the intrinsic statistical structure and adaptive organization of language may contribute to the development of more realistic models of human communication.
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Chairman: B. Graczykowski
Additional Information: All are invited to Coffee with the Speaker, starting at 12:30 in front of the auditorium. Please follow the news on the MTPR website (http://mtpr.amu.edu.pl), where information about upcoming events will be available soon.
Those who cannot participate in person can follow the talk using Microsoft Teams: