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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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-02-17 Juan Ignacio Perotti , Orlando Vito Billoni

Zipf's law is a paradigm describing the importance of different elements in communication systems, especially in linguistics. Despite the complexity of the hierarchical structure of language, music has in some sense an even more complex…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-11-20 Marc Serra-Peralta , Joan Serrà , Álvaro Corral

The joint probability distribution of many degrees of freedom in biological systems, such as firing patterns in neural networks or antibody sequence composition in zebrafish, often follow Zipf's law, where a power law is observed on a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-08-13 David J. Schwab , Ilya Nemenman , Pankaj Mehta

Using data from gene expression databases on various organisms and tissues, including yeast, nematodes, human normal and cancer tissues, and embryonic stem cells, we found that the abundances of expressed genes exhibit a power-law…

Biological Physics · Physics 2009-11-07 Chikara Furusawa , Kunihiko Kaneko

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…

Applications · Statistics 2016-02-17 Isabel Moreno-Sánchez , Francesc Font-Clos , Álvaro Corral

Zipf's law predicts a power-law relationship between word rank and frequency in language communication systems and has been widely reported in a variety of natural language processing applications. However, the emergence of natural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-05 Bohdan Khomtchouk , Shyam Sudhakaran

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

Bayesian modelling and statistical text analysis rely on informed probability priors to encourage good solutions. This paper empirically analyses whether text in medical discharge reports follow Zipf's law, a commonly assumed statistical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Juan C Quiroz , Liliana Laranjo , Catalin Tufanaru , Ahmet Baki Kocaballi , Dana Rezazadegan , Shlomo Berkovsky , Enrico Coiera

In this study, we investigate whether speech symbols, learned through deep learning, follow Zipf's law, akin to natural language symbols. Zipf's law is an empirical law that delineates the frequency distribution of words, forming…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Shinnosuke Takamichi , Hiroki Maeda , Joonyong Park , Daisuke Saito , Hiroshi Saruwatari

Recent works have highlighted optimization difficulties faced by gradient descent in training the first and last layers of transformer-based language models, which are overcome by optimizers such as Adam. These works suggest that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Frederik Kunstner , Francis Bach

Zipf's law is the main regularity of quantitative linguistics. Despite of many works devoted to foundations of this law, it is still unclear whether it is only a statistical regularity, or it has deeper relations with information-carrying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Weibing Deng , Armen E. Allahverdyan

Zipf's law states that sequential frequencies of words in a text correspond to a power function. Its probabilistic model is an infinite urn scheme with asymptotically power distribution. The exponent of this distribution must be estimated.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-06-15 Mikhail Chebunin , Artyom Kovalevskii

Complex natural and technological systems can be considered, on a coarse-grained level, as assemblies of elementary components: for example, genomes as sets of genes, or texts as sets of words. On one hand, the joint occurrence of…

The growth dynamics of complex systems often exhibit statistical regularities involving power-law relationships. For real finite complex systems formed by countable tokens (animals, words) as instances of distinct types (species, dictionary…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-03-31 Pablo Rosillo-Rodes , Laurent Hébert-Dufresne , Peter Sheridan Dodds

The binary many-step Markov chain with the step-like memory function is considered as a model for the analysis of rank distributions of words in stochastic symbolic dynamical systems. We prove that the envelope curve for this distribution…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 K. E. Kechedzhy O. V. Usatenko , V. A. Yampol'skii

The performance of deep learning in natural language processing has been spectacular, but the reasons for this success remain unclear because of the inherent complexity of deep learning. This paper provides empirical evidence of its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-02-07 Shuntaro Takahashi , Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii

This paper studies the limits of language models' statistical learning in the context of Zipf's law. First, we demonstrate that Zipf-law token distribution emerges irrespective of the chosen tokenization. Second, we show that Zipf…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Elizaveta Zhemchuzhina , Nikolai Filippov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

A mechanism-free and symbol-agnostic conservation principle, the Conservation of Hartley-Shannon Information (CoHSI) is predicted to constrain the structure of discrete systems regardless of their origin or function. Despite their distinct…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2019-02-26 Les Hatton , Gregory Warr

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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-16 Michael Ramscar

Symbolic sequences such as written language and genomic DNA display characteristic frequency distributions and long-range correlations extending over many symbols. In language, this takes the form of Zipf's law for word frequencies together…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Marcelo A. Montemurro , Mirko Degli Esposti