Related papers: Zipf's law unzipped
Zipf's law is just one out of many universal laws proposed to describe statistical regularities in language. Here we review and critically discuss how these laws can be statistically interpreted, fitted, and tested (falsified). The modern…
Zipf's law for cities is probably the most famous regularity in social sciences. So much that, a hundred years of publication later, its status is not clear: is it a law of social organisation? Is it an instrument of description of city…
We show how generalized Gibbs-Shannon entropies can provide new insights on the statistical properties of texts. The universal distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) implies that the generalized entropies, computed at the word level,…
Although Zipf's law is widespread in natural and social data, one often encounters situations where one or both ends of the ranked data deviate from the power-law function. Previously we proposed the Beta rank function to improve the…
We show that the laws of Zipf and Benford, obeyed by scores of numerical data generated by many and diverse kinds of natural phenomena and human activity are related to the focal expression of a generalized thermodynamic structure. This…
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 summarize a book under publication with his title written by the three present authors, on the theory of Zipf's law, and more generally of power laws, driven by the mechanism of proportional growth. The preprint is available upon request…
Urban agglomerations exhibit complex emergent features of which Zipf's law, i.e.\ a power-law size distribution, and fractality may be regarded as the most prominent ones. We propose a simplistic model for the generation of city-like…
A set of data with positive values follows a Pareto distribution if the log-log plot of value versus rank is approximately a straight line. A Pareto distribution satisfies Zipf's law if the log-log plot has a slope of -1. Since many types…
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…
Urban scaling and Zipf's law are two fundamental paradigms for the science of cities. These laws have mostly been investigated independently and are often perceived as disassociated matters. Here we present a large scale investigation about…
The study of complex systems is limited by the fact that only few variables are accessible for modeling and sampling, which are not necessarily the most relevant ones to explain the systems behavior. In addition, empirical data typically…
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…
A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more than a decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies. The family is a based on a combination of two information theoretic principles:…
When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear…
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…
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 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…
Some of the progress in determining the phase boundaries of the nuclear phase diagram, the location of the critical point of the nuclear fragmentation phase transition, and the values of the critical exponents of this transition is…
We introduce a simple and generic model that reproduces Zipf's law. By regarding the time evolution of the model as a random walk in the logarithmic scale, we explain theoretically why this model reproduces Zipf's law. The explanation shows…