Related papers: N-tuple Zipf Analysis and Modeling for Language, C…

It is traditionally assumed that Zipf's law implies the power-law growth of the number of different elements with the total number of elements in a system - the so-called Heaps' law. We show that a careful definition of Zipf's law leads to…

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 is a fundamental paradigm in the statistics of written and spoken natural language as well as in other communication systems. We raise the question of the elementary units for which Zipf's law should hold in the most natural way,…

Understanding the innovation process, that is the underlying mechanisms through which novelties emerge, diffuse and trigger further novelties is undoubtedly of fundamental importance in many areas (biology, linguistics, social science and…

It turns out that some empirical facts in Big Data are the effects of properties of large numbers. Zipf's law 'noise' is an example of such an artefact. We expose several properties of the power law distributions and of similar distribution…

According to Zipf's meaning-frequency law, words that are more frequent tend to have more meanings. Here it is shown that a linear dependency between the frequency of a form and its number of meanings is found in a family of models of…

Natural language data follows a power-law distribution, with most knowledge and skills appearing at very low frequency. While a common intuition suggests that reweighting or curating data towards a uniform distribution may help models…

The article introduces corrections to Zipf's and Heaps' laws based on systematic models of the proportion of hapaxes, i.e., words that occur once. The derivation rests on two assumptions: The first one is the standard urn model which…

It has been shown recently that a specific class of path-dependent stochastic processes, which reduce their sample space as they unfold, lead to exact scaling laws in frequency and rank distributions. Such Sample Space Reducing processes…

Zipf's law on word frequency is observed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and so on, yet it does not hold for Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. A model for writing process is proposed to explain the above difference, which takes…

The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf's law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the power law exponent converges strongly to $-1$ as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are…

Zipf's law in the field of linguistics is tested in the nuclear disassembly within the framework of isospin dependent lattice gas model. It is found that the average cluster charge (or mass) of rank $n$ in the charge (or mass) list shows…

In Phys. Rev. Letters (73:2, 5 Dec. 94), Mantegna et al. conclude on the basis of Zipf rank frequency data that noncoding DNA sequence regions are more like natural languages than coding regions. We argue on the contrary that an empirical…

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 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…

The prevailing maximum likelihood estimators for inferring power law models from rank-frequency data are biased. The source of this bias is an inappropriate likelihood function. The correct likelihood function is derived and shown to be…

Here we sketch a new derivation of Zipf's law for word frequencies based on optimal coding. The structure of the derivation is reminiscent of Mandelbrot's random typing model but it has multiple advantages over random typing: (1) it starts…

In the setting of minimal local grammar-based coding, the input string is represented as a grammar with the minimal output length defined via simple symbol-by-symbol encoding. This paper discusses four contributions to this field. First, we…

The word embedding space in neural models is skewed, and correcting this can improve task performance. We point out that most approaches for modeling, correcting, and measuring the symmetry of an embedding space implicitly assume that the…

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…