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The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-04 Xiaoyong Yan , Petter Minnhagen

Complex systems, such as life and languages, are governed by principles of evolution. The analogy and comparison between biology and linguistics\cite{alphafold2, RoseTTAFold, lang_virus, cell language, faculty1, language of gene, Protein…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2026-03-18 Li-Min Wang , Hsing-Yi Lai , Sun-Ting Tsai , Chen Siang Ng , Kevin Sheng-Kai Ma , Shan-Jyun Wu , Meng-Xue Tsai , Yi-Ching Su , Daw-Wei Wang , Tzay-Ming Hong

Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-27 Doreen Osmelak , Yang Xu , Michael Hahn , Kate McCurdy

If an infinite non-periodic word is uniformly recurrent or is of bounded repetition, then the limit of its periodicity complexity is infinity. Moreover, there are uniformly recurrent words with the periodicity complexity arbitrarily high at…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2019-12-18 Štěpán Holub

We propose a stochastic model for the number of different words in a given database which incorporates the dependence on the database size and historical changes. The main feature of our model is the existence of two different classes of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-05-16 Martin Gerlach , Eduardo G. Altmann

Zipf's power-law distribution is a generic empirical statistical regularity found in many complex systems. However, rather than universality with a single power-law exponent (equal to 1 for Zipf's law), there are many reported deviations…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-03-18 Ryohei Hisano , Didier Sornette , Takayuki Mizuno

The frequency distributions of DNA k-mers are shaped by fundamental biological processes and offer a window into genome structure and evolution. Inspired by analogies to natural language, prior studies have attempted to model genomic k-mer…

Cooking is a cultural expression of human creativity that transcends geography and time through the orchestration of ingredients and techniques, much like languages do through words and syntax. Yet, beneath the apparent diversity of…

We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-04-22 Weibing Deng , Armen E. Allahverdyan

A major challenge of interdisciplinary description of complex system behaviour is whether real systems of higher complexity levels can be understood with at least the same degree of objective, "scientific" rigour and universality as…

General Physics · Physics 2014-05-27 Andrei P. Kirilyuk

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis proposes that speakers aim to distribute information evenly throughout a text, balancing production effort and listener comprehension difficulty. However, language typically does not maintain…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-05 Eleftheria Tsipidi , Samuel Kiegeland , Franz Nowak , Tianyang Xu , Ethan Wilcox , Alex Warstadt , Ryan Cotterell , Mario Giulianelli

The power law is useful in describing count phenomena such as network degrees and word frequencies. With a single parameter, it captures the main feature that the frequencies are linear on the log-log scale. Nevertheless, there have been…

Applications · Statistics 2024-07-24 Clement Lee , Emma Eastoe , Aiden Farrell

We study the cycle structure of words in several random permutations. We assume that the permutations are independent and that their distribution is conjugation invariant, with a good control on their short cycles. If, after successive…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2023-10-24 Mohamed Slim Kammoun , Mylène Maïda

Written language is complex. A written text can be considered an attempt to convey a meaningful message which ends up being constrained by language rules, context dependence and highly redundant in its use of resources. Despite all these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-05-20 E. Estevez-Rams , A. Mesa Rodriguez , D. Estevez-Moya

In this article, I conduct a textual and contextual analysis of the empirical literature on Zipf's law for cities. Building on previous meta-analysis material openly available, I collect full texts and bibliographies of 66 scientific…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-02-01 Clémentine Cottineau

The origin(s) of the ubiquity of probability distribution functions (PDF) with power law tails is still a matter of fascination and investigation in many scientific fields from linguistic, social, economic, computer sciences to essentially…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-11-01 Kiyoshi Kanazawa , Didier Sornette

In natural language using short sentences is considered efficient for communication. However, a text composed exclusively of such sentences looks technical and reads boring. A text composed of long ones, on the other hand, demands…

The subword complexity of a word $w$ over a finite alphabet $\mathcal{A}$ is a function that assigns for each positive integer $n$, the number of distinct subwords of length $n$ in $w$. The subword complexity of a word is a good measure of…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2014-09-16 Hannah Vogel

The evolution of vocabulary in academic publishing is characterized via keyword frequencies recorded the ISI Web of Science citations database. In four distinct case-studies, evolutionary analysis of keyword frequency change through time is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-02-18 R. Alexander Bentley

A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so…

Physics and Society · Physics 2007-05-23 Z. K. Silagadze