dr hab. Łukasz Dębowski
I am an associate professor at the Institute of Computer Science, Polish Academy of Sciences (IPI PAN) and I work in the Statistical Analysis and Modeling Group (ZAMS).
💬 My email address is ldebowsk@ipipan.waw.pl.
I am interested in information theory, stochastic processes, statistical language models, power laws, and quantitative linguistics.
A sketch of me by Alicja Fenigsen
Selected publications
- information theory:
- ŁD, (2011). On the Vocabulary of Grammar-Based Codes and the Logical Consistency of Texts. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 57, pp. 4589–4599.
- ŁD, (2018). Is Natural Language a Perigraphic Process? The Theorem about Facts and Words Revisited. Entropy, vol. 20(2), pp. 85.
- ŁD, (2020). Approximating Information Measures for Fields. Entropy, vol. 22(1), pp. 79.
- mathematical statistics:
- ŁD, (2021). A Refutation of Finite-State Language Models Through Zipf’s Law for Factual Knowledge. Entropy, vol. 23, pp. 1148.
- ŁD, T. Steifer, (2022). Universal coding and prediction on ergodic random points. The Bulletin of Symbolic Logic, vol. 28(2), pp. 387–412.
- ŁD, (2023). Universal Densities Exist for Every Finite Reference Measure. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 69(8), pp. 5277–5288. (erratum)
- stochastic processes:
- ŁD, (2025). From Letters to Words and Back: Invertible Coding of Stationary Measures. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory, vol. 71(6), pp. 4306–4316.
- ŁD, (2025). Repetition and recurrence times: Dual statements and summable mixing rates. Electronic Communications in Probability, vol. 30, pp. 67.
- quantitative linguistics:
- R. Takahira, K. Tanaka-Ishii, ŁD, (2016). Entropy Rate Estimates for Natural Language—A New Extrapolation of Compressed Large-Scale Corpora. Entropy, vol. 18(10), pp. 364.
- ŁD, (2015). Maximal Repetitions in Written Texts: Finite Energy Hypothesis vs. Strong Hilberg Conjecture. Entropy, vol. 17, pp. 5903–5919.
- I. G. Torre, ŁD, A. Hernández-Fernández, (2021). Can Menzerath’s law be a criterion of complexity in communication? PLoS ONE, vol. 16(8), pp. e0256133.
- ŁD, (2025). Corrections of Zipf’s and Heaps’ Laws Derived from Hapax Rate Models. Journal of Quantitative Linguistics, vol. 32(2), pp. 128–165.
- P. Wieczyński, ŁD, (2025). Long-Range Dependence in Word Time Series: The Cosine Correlation of Embeddings. Entropy, vol. 27(6), pp. 613.
For recent preprints, please follow the ArXiv button on the rightbelow. The complete bibliography and selected slides are in the buttons above.
Monographs and textbooks
- Information Theory and Statistics (IPI PAN, 2013)
- Information Theory Meets Power Laws: Stochastic Processes and Language Models (Wiley, 2021)
- A Short Course in Universal Coding (draft, 2024)
PhD students
- Tomasz Steifer (defended 29.09.2020, co-supervised by Dariusz Kalociński)
- Paweł Wieczyński
My first PhD student has a a strictly smaller Erdős number than I. Congratulations!
My MSc thesis and my PhD thesis.
Here is my entry in the Mathematics Genealogy Project.
🎉 A few lighter items to catch your attention
- Jak się wzbogacić prawie na pewno? (How to get rich almost surely?)
- Charty zostały... czyli o generowaniu wierszy sylabicznych. (On automated generation of rhymed poems.)
- The Chaos by Gerard Nolst Trenité, transcribed into IPA symbols by me.
- The Making of My Mother's Book: From a Family Database to Family Trees.
- The Making of My Mother's Book: Named Entity Recognition for the Index of Persons.
- Auto-Refleksje / Auto-Reflections — poems by ChatGPT 4o about itself.
- Wycieczki filozoficzne 1992-1999 / Philosophical Trips 1992-1999 — see also Wycieczki 1992-2022.