Physical Sciences and Mathematics Commons^™

Exploring The Google Books Corpus: An Information-Theoretic Approach To Linguistic Evolution, Eitan Pechenick

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

The Google Books corpus contains millions of books in a variety of languages. Due to this incredible volume and its free availability, it is a treasure trove that has inspired a plethora of linguistic research.

It is tempting to treat frequency trends from Google Books data sets as indicators for the true popularity of various words and phrases. Doing so allows us to draw novel conclusions about the evolution of public perception of a given topic. However, sampling published works by availability and ease of digitization leads to several important effects, which have typically been overlooked in previous studies. One …

Using Empirical Mode Decomposition To Study Periodicity And Trends In Extreme Precipitation, Noah Pfister

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Classically, we look at annual maximum precipitation series from the perspective of extreme value statistics, which provides a useful statistical distribution, but does not allow much flexibility in the context of climate change. Such distributions are usually assumed to be static, or else require some assumed information about possible trends within the data. For this study, we treat the maximum rainfall series as sums of underlying signals, upon which we perform a decomposition technique, Empirical Mode Decomposition. This not only allows the study of non-linear trends in the data, but could give us some idea of the periodic forces that …

Lexical Mechanics: Partitions, Mixtures, And Context, Jake Ryland Williams

Graduate College Dissertations and Theses

Highly structured for efficient communication, natural languages are complex systems. Unlike in their computational cousins, functions and meanings in natural languages are relative, frequently prescribed to symbols through unexpected social processes. Despite grammar and definition, the presence of metaphor can leave unwitting language users "in the dark," so to speak. This is not problematic, but rather an important operational feature of languages, since the lifting of meaning onto higher-order structures allows individuals to compress descriptions of regularly-conveyed information. This compressed terminology, often only appropriate when taken locally (in context), is beneficial in an enormous world of novel experience. However, what …