English
Related papers

Related papers: Scaling Laws in Human Language

200 papers

The formation of sentences is a highly structured and history-dependent process. The probability of using a specific word in a sentence strongly depends on the 'history' of word-usage earlier in that sentence. We study a simple…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-05-28 Stefan Thurner , Rudolf Hanel , Bo Liu , Bernat Corominas-Murtra

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-06-17 Francesc Font-Clos , Alvaro Corral

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

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

Zipf's law is a hallmark of several complex systems with a modular structure, such as books composed by words or genomes composed by genes. In these component systems, Zipf's law describes the empirical power law distribution of component…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-12-05 Andrea Mazzolini , Alberto Colliva , Michele Caselle , Matteo Osella

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Neus Català , Jaume Baixeries , Ramon Ferrer-Cancho , Lluís Padró , Antoni Hernández-Fernández

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

The Zipf's law is the major regularity of statistical linguistics that served as a prototype for rank-frequency relations and scaling laws in natural sciences. Here we show that the Zipf's law -- together with its applicability for a single…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-06-15 Armen E. Allahverdyan , Weibing Deng , Q. A. Wang

We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Vladimir Berman

The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Bernardino Casas , Antoni Hernández-Fernández , Neus Català , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Jaume Baixeries

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…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Damián H. Zanette , Marcelo A. Montemurro

Zipf's law describes the empirical size distribution of the components of many systems in natural and social sciences and humanities. We show, by solving a statistical model, that Zipf's law co-occurs with the maximization of the diversity…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-10-05 Onofrio Mazzarisi , Amanda de Azevedo-Lopes , Jeferson J. Arenzon , Federico Corberi

We show that the Zipf's law for Chinese characters perfectly holds for sufficiently short texts (few thousand different characters). The scenario of its validity is similar to the Zipf's law for words in short English texts. For long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2014-03-10 W. B. Deng , A. E. Allahverdyan , B. Li , Q. A. Wang

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

We demonstrate that large texts, representing human (English, Russian, Ukrainian) and artificial (C++, Java) languages, display quantitative patterns characterized by the Benford-like and Zipf laws. The frequency of a word following the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-03-13 Evgeny Shulzinger , Irina Legchenkova , Edward Bormashenko

The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-04 Xiaoyong Yan , Petter Minnhagen

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Michael S. Vitevitch

Zipf's law states that the frequency of an observation with a given value is inversely proportional to the square of that value; Taylor's law, instead, describes the scaling between fluctuations in the size of a population and its mean.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-09-26 Charlotte James , Sandro Azaele , Amos Maritan , Filippo Simini

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-04-04 Bohdan B. Khomtchouk , Claes Wahlestedt

Here we present a new class of optimality for coding systems. Members of that class are displaced linearly from optimal coding and thus exhibit Zipf's law, namely a power-law distribution of frequency ranks. Within that class, Zipf's law,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho