PONE-D-22-35269On the fractal patterns of language structuresPLOS ONE

Dear Dr. RIBEIRO,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

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ACADEMIC EDITOR: The topic of the paper is very intriguing and makes a significant contribution to the study of languages. The authors should perhaps make more explicit than they already do how they used the CoNLL 2017 Corpora data (limited to selected languages) to respond to the first reviewer's comments. 

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Ramona Bongelli, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

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Additional Editor Comments:

The topic of the paper is very intriguing and makes a significant contribution to the study of languages.

The authors should perhaps make more explicit than they already do how they used the CoNLL 2017 Corpora data (limited to selected languages) to respond to the first reviewer's comments.

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Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: I Don't Know

Reviewer #2: Yes

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: I have to ask the authors to revise and resubmit their contribution. The reason is not that the article's findings are problematic (this is something I have not been able to assess yet) but that I cannot evaluate the manuscript at this stage, since the authors do NOT provide all the necessary data and code that one would need in order to replicate their results. Even if their study involves HPC computing, it is necessary that data AND code are shared already during the review stage with the reviewers and later -- in case of acceptance -- with the readers. The current MS claims to share data, but in the paper, I do not find a single link to their supplementary material, so I could not check the code for its suitability.

I will gladly provide a more thorough review of this study which may be potentially interesting, but only when data and code are present and allow me to inspect them thoroughly. This includes the code that was used to create the figures.

I recommend the authors to read the following two blog posts which will provide some guidance in how data and code can be shared when sending one's study to a scientific journal:

* https://calc.hypotheses.org/2782

* https://calc.hypotheses.org/2877

Reviewer #2: Things that need to be addressed as minor revisions:

Line #38: You mention phylogenetic methods, but I think a brief mention of what that means would be relevant here, particularly to help orient unfamiliar readers.

Line #66: I’d be interested in knowing what a ‘filament’ is.

Line #74: “discussed” should be “discuss”

Line #76: should it be: “the mathematical treatment of language”?

Line #104: Here you mention ‘long-range correlations’ for the first time, but you do not define what that means. This is important because you rely on this term (and on its opposite, short-range correlations) in the discussion of your findings.

Line #104: “can not be represented by a random walk” – I’m not sure what you mean here.

Lines #113-115: “The distribution of languages, their diversity and geographical coverage also present power-law behavior”

• I am not familiar with this. How is geographical coverage, for instance, governed by power laws?

Line #123: The Hurst exponent—you need to briefly mention what this is/does.

Lines #125-126: “This exponent is different from 0.5, which denotes that there are structures with long-range correlations.” Without further explanation of (a) what the exponent means, and (b) what long-range correlations are, this sentence does not make sense to the reader.

Line #203: “whose its elements” – remove ‘its’

Line #337: “We can see some groups of languages that spontaneously form in the space.” I’m not sure what you mean by ‘spontaneously form.’ Do you mean that have a tendency to cluster in Fig. 7?

Lines #370-372: “Therefore, for most of the languages we investigate, their natural evolution does not significantly alter their broader structures, indicating that they remain near their same-root languages in the longer-scale fractal dimension.” This is a very interesting claim, but I still wish that the concepts of shorter-scale and longer-scale fractal dimensions were more clearly discussed. That would help me better understand this idea.

Line #415: “For the few exceptions mentioned above…” Can you reiterate what those exceptions are here as a reminder?

Additional Comments

1. “Word embedding” is given as a keyword, but not discussed within the paper

2. Final paragraph of the introduction: It’s important that you start to discuss what you plan to do in this study, but some of this discussion is unclear. For example:

a. In lines #71 & 72, you write “we applied an algorithm developed in the last decade.” I immediately ask myself what the purpose/function of this algorithm is and where it came from.

b. Then you state that “we applied the tools of fractal geometry to observe similarities and differences among the many languages.” It’s not clear, however, how drawing on fractal geometry will allow you to observe these similarities and differences.

3. In the final paragraphs of your conclusion, you make some interesting claims related to the similarities in development of languages with similar/different roots. I’m happy to have learned this, but now I want to know why? What could be the motivator of this type of development? Is that discussed in the literature at all? What claims can you make?

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Reviewer #1: Yes: Johann-Mattis List

Reviewer #2: No

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On the fractal patterns of language structures

PONE-D-22-35269R1

Dear Dr. RIBEIRO,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

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Kind regards,

Ramona Bongelli, Ph.D.

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE