---
_id: '65363'
abstract:
- lang: eng
  text: 'Recent theoretical advancement of information density in natural language
    has brought the following question on desk: To what degree does natural language
    exhibit periodicity pattern in its encoded information? We address this question
    by introducing a new method called AutoPeriod of Surprisal (APS). APS adopts a
    canonical periodicity detection algorithm and is able to identify any significant
    periods that exist in the surprisal sequence of a single document. By applying
    the algorithm to a set of corpora, we have obtained the following interesting
    results: Firstly, a considerable proportion of human language demonstrates a strong
    pattern of periodicity in information; Secondly, new periods that are outside
    the distributions of typical structural units in text (e.g., sentence boundaries,
    elementary discourse units, etc.) are found and further confirmed via harmonic
    regression modeling. We conclude that the periodicity of information in language
    is a joint outcome from both structured factors and other driving factors that
    take effect at longer distances. The advantages of our periodicity detection method
    and its potentials in LLM-generation detection are further discussed.'
author:
- first_name: Yulin
  full_name: Ou, Yulin
  last_name: Ou
- first_name: Yu
  full_name: Wang, Yu
  last_name: Wang
- first_name: Yang
  full_name: Xu, Yang
  last_name: Xu
- first_name: Hendrik
  full_name: Buschmeier, Hendrik
  id: '76456'
  last_name: Buschmeier
  orcid: 0000-0002-9613-5713
citation:
  ama: Ou Y, Wang Y, Xu Y, Buschmeier H. Identifying the periodicity of information
    in natural language.
  apa: Ou, Y., Wang, Y., Xu, Y., &#38; Buschmeier, H. (n.d.). <i>Identifying the periodicity
    of information in natural language</i>. 64th Annual Meeting of the Association
    for Computational Linguistics, San Diego, CA, USA.
  bibtex: '@inproceedings{Ou_Wang_Xu_Buschmeier, title={Identifying the periodicity
    of information in natural language}, author={Ou, Yulin and Wang, Yu and Xu, Yang
    and Buschmeier, Hendrik} }'
  chicago: Ou, Yulin, Yu Wang, Yang Xu, and Hendrik Buschmeier. “Identifying the Periodicity
    of Information in Natural Language,” n.d.
  ieee: Y. Ou, Y. Wang, Y. Xu, and H. Buschmeier, “Identifying the periodicity of
    information in natural language,” presented at the 64th Annual Meeting of the
    Association for Computational Linguistics, San Diego, CA, USA.
  mla: Ou, Yulin, et al. <i>Identifying the Periodicity of Information in Natural
    Language</i>.
  short: 'Y. Ou, Y. Wang, Y. Xu, H. Buschmeier, in: n.d.'
conference:
  end_date: 2026-07-07
  location: San Diego, CA, USA
  name: 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
  start_date: 2026-07-02
date_created: 2026-04-07T09:52:23Z
date_updated: 2026-04-07T09:56:53Z
department:
- _id: '660'
language:
- iso: eng
publication_status: accepted
quality_controlled: '1'
status: public
title: Identifying the periodicity of information in natural language
type: conference
user_id: '76456'
year: '2026'
...