e-ISSN: Pending
Negative / Null Result ReportOpen accessComputer Science

Neutral evolution and turnover over centuries of English word popularity

Damian Ruck; R. Alexander Bentley; Alberto Acerbi; Philip Garnett; Daniel J. Hruschka · 2017 · arXiv

WASTE classifies this as Negative / Null Result Report · AI classification, approximate

The study found no significant effect — useful as a negative control or null benchmark for your own design.

Abstract (excerpt)

Here we test Neutral models against the evolution of English word frequency and vocabulary at the population scale, as recorded in annual word frequencies from three centuries of English language books. Against these data, we test both static and dynamic predictions of two neutral models, including the relation between corpus size and vocabulary size, frequency distributions, and turnover within those frequency distributions. Although a commonly used Neutral model fails to replicate all these emergent properties at once, we find that modified two-stage Neutral model does replicate the static a

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Metadata source: arXiv