Statistical laws and linguistics inform meaning in naturalistic and fictional conversation

2025-12-19

AI Summary

This study investigates whether Heaps’ law—governing lexical growth in discourse—is modulated by part-of-speech (POS) categories in natural dialogue (video-recorded conversations between strangers) versus fictional dialogue (scripted film/TV dialogue). Using cross-medium corpus collection, fine-grained POS tagging, and POS-specific Heaps’ law fitting, we conduct the first systematic comparison of vocabulary expansion rates for core word classes (e.g., nouns, verbs) across these discourse types. Results reveal that nouns expand significantly faster in fictional dialogue, whereas verbs exhibit greater growth advantage in natural dialogue—demonstrating that discourse type (interactive vs. narrative) exerts a deep, functional modulation on statistical linguistic regularities. This work bridges statistical linguistics with pragmatics and narratological linguistics, providing empirical grounding and a novel analytical framework for understanding how communicative function shapes macro-level language statistics.

Technology Category

• Natural Language Processing: Lexical Semantics and Morphology
• Application Domains: Humanities & Computational Social Science
• Data Mining & Knowledge Management: Conversational Systems for Recommendation & Retrieval

Application Category

• Web Mining and Content Analysis: Mining multimedia, multimodal, multilingual, cross-lingual Web data
• Social Networks and Social Media: Computational social science
• Semantics and Knowledge: Data modeling to support human-machine intelligence, including LLMs agents, intelligent system behavior, explanations, and user-friendly interactions

Abstract

Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is through statistical patterns such as Heaps' law, which holds that vocabulary size scales with document length. Little work on Heaps's law has looked at conversation and considered how language features impact scaling. We measure Heaps' law for conversations recorded in two distinct mediums: 1. Strangers brought together on video chat and 2. Fictional characters in movies. We find that scaling of vocabulary size differs by parts of speech. We discuss these findings through behavioral and linguistic frameworks.

Problem

• Investigates vocabulary scaling in conversations via Heaps' law
• Compares real stranger chats with fictional movie dialogues
• Analyzes how parts of speech affect vocabulary growth patterns

Innovation

• Heaps' law applied to video chat conversations
• Vocabulary scaling analyzed by parts of speech
• Comparison of fictional and real conversation dynamics