Related papers: Correct ordering in the Zipf-Poisson ensemble

Let $x \ge 2$, let $N_x$ be an integer chosen uniformly at random from the set $\mathbb Z \cap [1, x]$, and let $(V_1, V_2, \ldots)$ be a Poisson--Dirichlet process of parameter $1$. We prove that there exists a coupling of these two random…

Define a random variable $\xi_n$ by choosing a conjugacy class $C$ of the Sylow $p$-subgroup of $S_{p^n}$ by random, and let $\xi_n$ be the logarithm of the order of an element in $C$. We show that $\xi_n$ has bounded variance and mean…

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…

For an $n\times n$ random image with independent pixels, black with probability $p(n)$ and white with probability $1-p(n)$, the probability of satisfying any given first-order sentence tends to 0 or 1, provided both $p(n)n^{\frac{2}{k}}$…

The frequency of the preferred order for a noun phrase formed by demonstrative, numeral, adjective and noun has received significant attention over the last two decades. We investigate the actual distribution of the 24 possible orders.…

The problem addressed concerns the determination of the average number of successive attempts of guessing a word of a certain length consisting of letters with given probabilities of occurrence. Both first- and second-order approximations…

Let G be a finite group of nilpotency class 2 and w a group word. In this short paper we show that the probability that a random n-tuple of elements from G satisfies w is at least one over the order of G. This answers a special case of a…

Sorting is the task of ordering $n$ elements using pairwise comparisons. It is well known that $m=\Theta(n\log n)$ comparisons are both necessary and sufficient when the outcomes of the comparisons are observed with no noise. In this paper,…

Sorting is a fundamental problem in computer science. In the classical setting, it is well-known that $(1\pm o(1)) n\log_2 n$ comparisons are both necessary and sufficient to sort a list of $n$ elements. In this paper, we study the Noisy…

We say that a convergence law holds for a sequence of random combinatorial objects if, for any first-order sentence $\varphi$, the proportion of objects satisfying $\varphi$ converges to a limiting value as the size of the objects tends to…

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…

We show that a first-order sentence is almost surely true in a random group of density d<1/2 if and only if it is true in a non-abelian free group.

For N=1,2,..., let S_N be a simple random sample of size n=n_N from a population A_N of size N, where 0<=n<=N. Then with f_N=n/N, the sampling fraction, and 1_A the inclusion indicator that A is in S_N, for any H a subset of A_N of size k>=…

With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…

Assume in a sample of size M one finds M_i representatives of species i with i=1...N^*. The normalized frequency p^*_i=M_i/M, based on the finite sample, may deviate considerably from the true probabilities p_i. We propose a method to infer…

As neural language models approach human performance on NLP benchmark tasks, their advances are widely seen as evidence of an increasingly complex understanding of syntax. This view rests upon a hypothesis that has not yet been empirically…

Given positive integers $n$ and $m$, let $p_n(m)$ be the probability that a uniform random permutation of $[n]$ has order exactly $m$. We show that, as $n \to \infty$, the maximum of $p_n(m)$ over all $m$ is asymptotic to $1/n$, the…

Fix two words over the binary alphabet $\{0,1\}$, and generate iid Bernoulli$(p)$ bits until one of the words occurs in sequence. This setup, commonly known as Penney's ante, was popularized by Conway, who found (in unpublished work) a…

The problem of compression in standard information theory consists of assigning codes as short as possible to numbers. Here we consider the problem of optimal coding -- under an arbitrary coding scheme -- and show that it predicts Zipf's…

We consider a component of the word statistics known as clump; starting from a finite set of words, clumps are maximal overlapping sets of these occurrences. This parameter has first been studied by Schbath with the aim of counting the…