Related papers: Universal Complex Structures in Written Language
Human language, the most powerful communication system in history, is closely associated with cognition. Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how…
Languages across the world exhibit Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely more frequent words tend to be shorter. The generalized version of the law - an inverse relationship between the frequency of a unit and its magnitude - holds also for…
We present an impossibility result, called a theorem about facts and words, which pertains to a general communication system. The theorem states that the number of distinct words used in a finite text is roughly greater than the number of…
Zipf's law is found when the vocabulary of long written texts is ranked according to the frequency of word occurrences, establishing a power-law decay for the frequency vs rank relation. This law is a robust statistical property observed…
The rank-size plots of a large number of different physical and socio-economic systems are usually said to follow Zipf's law, but a unique framework for the comprehension of this ubiquitous scaling law is still lacking. Here we show that a…
Long-range correlations are found in symbolic sequences from human language, music and DNA. Determining the span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences is crucial for shedding light on their communicative complexity. Dolphin whistles…
We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…
We checked that the distribution of words in text should uniform, which gives Heaps' law as natural result, that is, the number of types of words can be expressed as a power law of the number of tokens within text. We developed a…
Despite being a paradigm of quantitative linguistics, Zipf's law for words suffers from three main problems: its formulation is ambiguous, its validity has not been tested rigorously from a statistical point of view, and it has not been…
Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and…
Zipf's law is the most common statistical distribution displaying scaling behavior. Cities, populations or firms are just examples of this seemingly universal law. Although many different models have been proposed, no general theoretical…
In a language corpus, the probability that a word occurs $n$ times is often proportional to $1/n^2$. Assigning rank, $s$, to words according to their abundance, $\log s$ vs $\log n$ typically has a slope of minus one. That simple Zipf's law…
Zipf's law predicts a power-law relationship between word rank and frequency in language communication systems, and is widely reported in texts yet remains enigmatic as to its origins. Computer simulations have shown that language…
We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two…
The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication,…
The review summarizes the main methodological concepts used in studying natural language from the perspective of complexity science and documents their applicability in identifying both universal and system-specific features of language in…
Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…
In this paper we combine statistical analysis of large text databases and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. Besides the sublinear scaling of the vocabulary size with…
We investigate the origin of Zipf's law for words in written texts by means of a stochastic dynamical model for text generation. The model incorporates both features related to the general structure of languages and memory effects inherent…
Zipf's law describes the empirical size distribution of the components of many systems in natural and social sciences and humanities. We show, by solving a statistical model, that Zipf's law co-occurs with the maximization of the diversity…