Techniques are disclosed for generating a sequence of symbols based on input data for a neuro-linguistic model. The model may be used by a behavior recognition system to analyze the input data. A mapper component of a neuro-linguistic module in the behavior recognition system receives one or more normalized vectors generated from the input data. The mapper component generates one or more clusters based on a statistical distribution of the normalized vectors. The mapper component evaluates statistics and identifies statistically relevant clusters. The mapper component assigns a distinct symbol to each of the identified clusters.