English

A Two Parameters Equation for Word Rank-Frequency Relation

Computation and Language 2022-05-03 v1

Abstract

Let f()f (\cdot) be the absolute frequency of words and rr be the rank of words in decreasing order of frequency, then the following function can fit the rank-frequency relation f(r;s,t)=(rmaxr)1s(rmax+trexpr+trexp)1+(1+t)s f (r;s,t) = \left(\frac{r_{\tt max}}{r}\right)^{1-s} \left(\frac{r_{\tt max}+t \cdot r_{\tt exp}}{r+t \cdot r_{\tt exp}}\right)^{1+(1+t)s} where rmaxr_{\tt max} and rexpr_{\tt exp} are the maximum and the expectation of the rank, respectively; s>0s>0 and t>0t>0 are parameters estimated from data. On well-behaved data, there should be s<1s<1 and st<1s \cdot t < 1.

Cite

@article{arxiv.2205.00638,
  title  = {A Two Parameters Equation for Word Rank-Frequency Relation},
  author = {Chenchen Ding},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2205.00638},
  year   = {2022}
}
R2 v1 2026-06-24T11:04:13.825Z