NEWSLETTER BFI April 15th 2007
Bandung Fe Institute
NEWSLETTER BANDUNG FE INSTITUTE (BFI)
April 15 2006
CONTENTS:
01. Indonesian Languages: Study to Zipf Law
02. Econophysics at Universitas Bina Nusantara Jakarta
03. Special Issue of Journal of Social Complexity
01. Indonesian Languages: Study to Zipf Law
Indonesia is a very heterogenous country in ethnicities. From east to
west and from north to south, most Indonesian people are able to talk,
read, write, do prayers, and do jokes with two languages, their ethnic
languages and the unifying language, Indonesian language (or some
prefer to call it Bahasa Indonesia). Nonetheless, the differences of
ethnic languages have become one important thing comprising the
complexity of Indonesian sociological facts while in the other hand
this fact is a kind of richness data we could have in Indonesia. This
richness is apparently could also enrich the linguistics as we could
apply some of analytical works to the data.
One interesting fact we could find in empirical linguistic studies,
especially the quantitative one, is the power law exhibited in the
rank of words frequency in texts. Concerning the classic work of
Harvard professor, G. K. Zipf (1947), the power law seems to be not
that outlandish among linguist, as it has been showed that the power
law in the Zipf plot is linked to the writer and reader natural
behavior to minimizing their effort while communicating. In this case,
the writer's effort is conserved by using a small vocabulary of common
words and the reader's effort is reduced by having a large vocabulary
of individually rarer words - a way to make the messages less vague.
Here, Zipf argued that the Zipf's law is supported by the maximally
economical compromise between the competing needs between writer (or
speaker) and reader (or listener).
This is the thing we would like to see in Indonesian ethnic language.
In Indonesia, there are more than 400 ethnic languages and it is a
matter of fact that most of them have read bibles in their own
languages. This becomes interesting for a great deal of linguistic
analyses trying to make distinctions among languages. For instance,
the plenty of ethnic languages were arisen from the evolution of
language that in some ways related to the first populations in
Indonesia as they migrated from other parts in Asia. Thus, any
analysis regarding to the variations of language, in some cases could
lead us to our further understanding about the evolution of the
various Indonesian ethnics since language plays a very important role
in the evolution of civilization.
Regarding to these issues, there have been two new papers published in
the institute. Both of them are reports in the Dept. Computational
Sociology. You may want to download them for further reading as they
are freely accessible, URL: http://www.bandungfe.net/xpf/. However,
you should register for free if you would like to download them.
The twos are:
1. BFI Working Paper Series WPA2007
An Observational Framework to the Zipfian Analysis among Different
Languages: Studies to Indonesian Ethnic Biblical Texts
by Hokky Situngkir
URL: http://www.bandungfe.net/?go=xpf&&crp=46220b8e
Abstract
The paper introduces the used of Zipfian statistics to observe the
human languages by using the same (meaning) corpus/corpora but
different in grammatical and structural utterances. We used biblical
texts since they contain corpuses that have been most widely and
carefully translated into many languages. The idea is to reduce the
possibility of noise came from the meaning of the texts in
distinctive language. The result is that the robustness of the Zipfian
law is observable and some statistical differences are discovered
between English and widely used national and several ethnic languages
in Indonesia. The paper ends by modestly propose further possible
framework in interdisciplinary approaches to human language evolution.
Keywords: statistical processing of natural language, Zipf's law, Zipf-
Mandelbrot fit, corpus, evolution of language.
2. BFI Working Paper Series WPC2007
Regimes in Babel are Confirmed: Report on Findings in Several
Indonesian Ethnic Biblical Texts
by Hokky Situngkir
URL: http://www.bandungfe.net/?go=xpf&&crp=46220d43
Abstract
The paper introduces the presence of three statistical regimes in the
Zipfian analysis of texts in quantitative linguistics: the Mandelbrot,
original Zipf, and Cancho- Solé-Montemurro regimes. The work is
carried out over nine different languages of the same intention
semantically: the bible from different languages in Indonesian ethnic
and national language. As always, the same analysis is also brought in
English version of the Bible for reference. The existence of the three
regimes are confirmed while in advance the length of the texts are
also becomes an important issue. We outline some further works
regarding the quantitative analysis for parameterization used to
analyze the three regimes and the task to have broad explanation,
especially the microstructure of the language in human decision or
linguistic effort - emerging the robustness of them.
Keywords: quantitative linguistics, Zipfian analysis, macro-properties
of texts.
02. Econophysics at Universitas Bina Nusantara Jakarta
On April 13th 2007, the Faculty of Economics Universitas Bina
Nusantara Jakarta was helding the a special seminar with the theme
'The Applications of Physics at the Stock Market' and it is directly
referred to the so-called econophysics. The seminar invites two
researchers of Surya Research International and Bandung Fe Institute,
Hokky Situngkir and Yun Hariadi. The topics covered in the seminar can
be divided into two parts as those are also giving distinct categories
in the trends of econophysics researches, i.e.:
The Complexity of the Stock Market
with presentations by Hokky Situngkir
URL: http://www.bandungfe.net/?go=xpf&&crp=46220dea
and
Finding Correlations in the Stock Market
with presentations by Yun Hariadi
URL: http://www.bandungfe.net/?go=xpf&&crp=46220f12
The seminars were delivered in Indonesian, and interested Indonesian
readers may download them for free at the series of BFI Working Papers
with URL: http://www.bandungfe.net/xpf/
03. Special Issue of Journal of Social Complexity
The institute is now on post-preparation of the publication of the new
issue of the Journal of Social Complexity. This new issue is a special
edition since the papers included in this issue have been presented at
the Economic Science Association 2005 European Regional Meeting, held
in Alessandria, Italy (September 15-18th). Professor Marco Novarese
(Centre for Cognitive Economics, Università del Piemonte Orientale,
Italy) is the guest editor of the special edition. For Indonesian
readers, you may want to buy one copy at your local popular book
stores (Gramedia and Gunung Agung) or you may directly contact BFI
Office to have one. Alternatively, you may also contact Yohanis Kwee
(BFI Jakarta Representative) at the below address:
Yohanis Kwee
w/a: Surya Research International
Ruko Cyberpark
Jalan Boulevard Gajah Mada no. 2152
Lippo Karawaci
Tangerang 15811 - Banten
Indonesia
ph. +62 21 5512584
mobile. +62 818144552
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BFI Administration
Bandung Fe Institute
Sarijadi Blok 5 No. 151
Bandung 40151
JAWA BARAT
INDONESIA
ph./fax: +62 22 2018232
http://www.bandungfe.net
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