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The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2012-07-17 Reginald D. Smith

A power-free language is characterized by the number of symbols used and a limit on how many times a block of symbols can repeat consecutively. For certain values of these parameters, it is known that the number of legal words grows…

Dynamical Systems · Mathematics 2025-07-28 Vaughn Climenhaga

We show why the amount of information communicated between the past and future--the excess entropy--is not in general the amount of information stored in the present--the statistical complexity. This is a puzzle, and a long-standing one,…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2013-05-29 James P. Crutchfield , Christopher J. Ellison , John R. Mahoney

When generating natural language from neural probabilistic models, high probability does not always coincide with high quality: It has often been observed that mode-seeking decoding methods, i.e., those that produce high-probability text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Clara Meister , Gian Wiher , Tiago Pimentel , Ryan Cotterell

In this paper, we study the technical problem of developing conversational agents that can quickly adapt to unseen tasks, learn task-specific communication tactics, and help listeners finish complex, temporally extended tasks. We find that…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2024-01-08 Xiaoran Wu , Yipeng Kang

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…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Zixuan Wang , Xingyu Dang , Jason D. Lee , Kaifeng Lyu

Natural languages are full of rules and exceptions. One of the most famous quantitative rules is Zipf's law which states that the frequency of occurrence of a word is approximately inversely proportional to its rank. Though this `law' of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-05-27 Jake Ryland Williams , James P. Bagrow , Christopher M. Danforth , Peter Sheridan Dodds

Sentence is a basic linguistic unit, however, little is known about how information content is distributed across different positions of a sentence. Based on authentic language data of English, the present study calculated the entropy and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-09-27 Shuiyuan Yu , Jin Cong , Junying Liang , Haitao Liu

Word embeddings allow natural language processing systems to share statistical information across related words. These embeddings are typically based on distributional statistics, making it difficult for them to generalize to rare or unseen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-09-27 Parminder Bhatia , Robert Guthrie , Jacob Eisenstein

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

Many biological phenomena or social events critically depend on how information evolves in complex networks. However, a general theory to characterize information evolution is yet absent. Consequently, numerous unknowns remain about the…

Biological Physics · Physics 2022-07-20 Yang Tian , Guoqi Li , Pei Sun

Despite the wide usage of information as a concept in science, we have yet to develop a clear & concise scientific definition. This paper is aimed at laying the foundations for a new theory concerning the mechanics of information alongside…

General Physics · Physics 2017-07-13 Kiyam Lin , SongLing Lin

The Chapter starts with introductory information about quantitative linguistics notions, like rank--frequency dependence, Zipf's law, frequency spectra, etc. Similarities in distributions of words in texts with level occupation in quantum…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2024-01-04 Andrij Rovenchak

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

This paper introduces new methods based on exponential families for modeling the correlations between words in text and speech. While previous work assumed the effects of word co-occurrence statistics to be constant over a window of several…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2008-02-03 Doug Beeferman , Adam Berger , John Lafferty

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-10-14 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

This paper investigates the information encoded in the embeddings of large language models (LLMs). We conduct simulations to analyze the representation entropy and discover a power law relationship with model sizes. Building upon this…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2024-02-07 Zhiquan Tan , Chenghai Li , Weiran Huang

Words in natural language follow a Zipfian distribution whereby some words are frequent but most are rare. Learning representations for words in the "long tail" of this distribution requires enormous amounts of data. Representations of rare…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2018-03-08 Dzmitry Bahdanau , Tom Bosc , Stanisław Jastrzębski , Edward Grefenstette , Pascal Vincent , Yoshua Bengio

Taylor's law describes the fluctuation characteristics underlying a system in which the variance of an event within a time span grows by a power law with respect to the mean. Although Taylor's law has been applied in many natural and social…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-06-08 Tatsuru Kobayashi , Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii

Recent theoretical advancement of information density in natural language has brought the following question on desk: To what degree does natural language exhibit periodicity pattern in its encoded information? We address this question by…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-27 Yulin Ou , Yu Wang , Yang Xu , Hendrik Buschmeier