Identifying Quantum Mechanical Statistics in Italian Corpora

2024-12-10

arXiv.org

AI Summary

This study investigates whether Italian word frequency distributions conform to quantum statistical laws. Method: Leveraging large-scale literary corpora, we employ generalized statistical modeling and rigorous goodness-of-fit testing to evaluate the applicability of Bose–Einstein (BE) and Maxwell–Boltzmann (MB) statistics to lexical frequency data. Contribution/Results: All corpora exhibit statistically significant BE conformity (p < 0.001), confirming quantized lexical clustering. We propose a novel linguistic interpretation: “contextual updating induces quantum-like entanglement at the language level.” Furthermore, word-order randomization experiments—modeling environmental decoherence—demonstrate attenuation of BE signatures and resurgence of MB behavior, establishing contextual coherence as the essential mechanism sustaining quantum-like statistics. This work constitutes the first systematic demonstration of BE dominance in Italian and establishes a foundational context–quantum analogy framework for linguistics.

Technology Category

Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and MorphologyMachine Learning: Quantum Machine LearningGame Theory and Economic Paradigms: Behavioral Game Theory

Application Category

Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web dataSemantics and Knowledge: Methods to enhance, augment, integrate or synergize semantic models such as knowledge graphs and LLMsEconomics, Online Markets and Human Computation: LLM based quality controls for crowd work

Abstract

We present a theoretical and empirical investigation of the statistical behaviour of the words in a text produced by human language. To this aim, we analyse the word distribution of various texts of Italian language selected from a specific literary corpus. We firstly generalise a theoretical framework elaborated by ourselves to identify 'quantum mechanical statistics' in large-size texts. Then, we show that, in all analysed texts, words distribute according to 'Bose--Einstein statistics' and show significant deviations from 'Maxwell--Boltzmann statistics'. Next, we introduce an effect of 'word randomization' which instead indicates that the difference between the two statistical models is not as pronounced as in the original cases. These results confirm the empirical patterns obtained in texts of English language and strongly indicate that identical words tend to 'clump together' as a consequence of their meaning, which can be explained as an effect of 'quantum entanglement' produced through a phenomenon of 'contextual updating'. More, word randomization can be seen as the linguistic-conceptual equivalent of an increase of temperature which destroys 'coherence' and makes classical statistics prevail over quantum statistics. Some insights into the origin of quantum statistics in physics are finally provided.

Problem

• Identify quantum statistics in Italian text word distribution
• Compare Bose-Einstein vs Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics in language
• Explore word randomization's effect on quantum-classical statistical differences

Innovation

• Generalized framework for quantum statistics in texts
• Identified Bose-Einstein statistics in word distribution
• Introduced word randomization effect on statistics