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A Stylometric Analog of the Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou Problem: Combination of Human Bias and Long-Range Correlation Creates a Sort of Soliton

Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: Revealing correlations for styles in texts has been an interesting topic, providing an example of trans-disciplinarity between physics and linguistics. Typical cases can be seen for sound correlations in verses as well as for word correlations in prose. Of these, long-range correlations are of particular interest because of their connection to the Markovian nature in human cognition. For a famous novel written in an archaic style of Japanese, we conduct an analysis of a series of kanji compounds in the text. Here, kanji is a Japanese name for Chinese characters. Specifically, we focus on the number (equivalent to the length) of a compound. Subsequently, the sequence of numbers is expanded into 6-bit binary codes (equivalent to 64 modes). Replacing each compound in the text with an oscillator in a string, for the chain of the kanji compounds, one can find an analogy with the so-called Fermi-Pasta-Ulam-Tsingou (FPUT) model. Comparative analyses for 16 modern translations by humans and machines show, without exception, a strong dominance for a particular mode and its stability bearing a remote resemblance to a soliton, and at the same time, reproduce a statistical property far from a sort of ergodicity. Furthermore, comparison between the human and machine translations shows that the entropy of the latter is higher than that of the former because machines are subjected to neither a psychological bias nor an inspection by editors. Lastly, in addition to the above translated texts, 6 codices of the classic are also analyzed, and their results are compared with those of the modern translations. Note that the original of the classic has not been found yet.
Source: Entropy
DOI: 10.3390/e28050574
Language: English
Open Access status: gold
Estimated APC paid: $3,137
OpenAlex ID: W7161972308
FWCI:
Cites: 19
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