This book collects research contributions concerning quantitative approaches to characterize
originality and universality in language. The target audience comprises researchers and experts
in the field but the book may also be beneficial for graduate students.Creativity might be
considered as a morphogenetic process combining universal features with originality. While
quantitative methods applied to text and music reveal universal features of language and music
originality is a highly appreciated feature of authors composers and performers.In this
framework the different methods of traditional problems of authorship attribution and document
classification provide important insights on how to quantify the unique features of authors
composers and styles. Such unique features contrast and are restricted by universal
signatures such as scaling laws in word-frequency distribution entropy measures long-range
correlations among others. This interplay between innovation and universality is also an
essential ingredient of methods for automatic text generation.Innovation in language becomes
relevant when it is imitated and spread to other speakers and musicians. Modern digital
databases provide new opportunities to characterize and model the creation and evolution of
linguistic innovations on historical time scales a particularly important example of the more
general problem of spreading of innovations in complex social systems.This multidisciplinary
book combines scientists from various different backgrounds interested in quantitative analysis
of variations (synchronic and diachronic) in language and music. The aim is to obtain a deeper
understanding of how originality emerges can be quantified and propagates.
