Mathematical Modelling in Linguistics and Text Analysis

This book is a panorama of contemporary quantitative linguistics, as developed over decades. It highlights the main topics of QL: statistical laws of language, taxonomy of linguistic phenomena, authorial attribution, quantitative analysis of syntax (e.g., dependency grammar), measurement of text difficulty, and other phenomena at the intersection of linguistics, literary studies, semiotics, and information science. It also reflects on the relevance of these time-honoured approaches in our new reality increasingly dominated by AI – both in terms of text material and methodology. Before our very eyes, computers are achieving human-level linguistic competence. The era of LLMs and the growing dominance of machine-generated text is becoming reality. The scale of these changes, initiated by the replacement of print with the digital universe, is enormous. Today, linguistics is closer than ever to mathematics and computer science, and thus quantitatively-oriented linguists are particularly well-suited to address questions about the boundary between humans and machines in scientific research.