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Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes , Erich R. Round

One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Li-Min Wang , Sun-Ting Tsai , Shan-Jyun Wu , Meng-Xue Tsai , Daw-Wei Wang , Yi-Ching Su , Tzay-Ming Hong

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Łukasz Dębowski

The binary many-step Markov chain with the step-like memory function is considered as a model for the analysis of rank distributions of words in stochastic symbolic dynamical systems. We prove that the envelope curve for this distribution…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 K. E. Kechedzhy O. V. Usatenko , V. A. Yampol'skii

Background: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are observed in disparate complex systems. Of particular interests, these two laws often appear together. Many theoretical models and analyses are performed to understand their co-occurrence in real…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2010-12-20 Linyuan Lu , Zi-Ke Zhang , Tao Zhou

Recent works have highlighted optimization difficulties faced by gradient descent in training the first and last layers of transformer-based language models, which are overcome by optimizers such as Adam. These works suggest that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Frederik Kunstner , Francis Bach

Zipf's law, which states that the probability of an observation is inversely proportional to its rank, has been observed in many domains. While there are models that explain Zipf's law in each of them, those explanations are typically…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2016-07-06 Laurence Aitchison , Nicola Corradi , Peter E. Latham

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…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2019-03-27 Steven A. Frank

We have translated fractional Brownian motion (FBM) signals into a text based on two ''letters'', as if the signal fluctuations correspond to a constant stepsize random walk. We have applied the Zipf method to extract the $\zeta '$ exponent…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-11-07 Ph. Bronlet , M. Ausloos

Human language, the most powerful communication system in history, is closely associated with cognition. Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2009-02-05 M. Angeles Serrano , Alessandro Flammini , Filippo Menczer

Zipf's law establishes a scaling behavior for word-frequencies in large text corpora. The appearance of Zipfian properties in human language has been previously explained as an optimization problem for the interests of speakers and hearers.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-02-24 Javier Vera , Felipe Urbina , Wenceslao Palma

Long-range correlations are found in symbolic sequences from human language, music and DNA. Determining the span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences is crucial for shedding light on their communicative complexity. Dolphin whistles…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-12-03 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Brenda McCowan

Zipf's law in its basic incarnation is an empirical probability distribution governing the frequency of usage of words in a language. As Terence Tao recently remarked, it still lacks a convincing and satisfactory mathematical explanation.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-04-30 Yuri I. Manin

History-dependent processes are ubiquitous in natural and social systems. Many such stochastic processes, especially those that are associated with complex systems, become more constrained as they unfold, meaning that their sample-space, or…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-04-16 Bernat Corominas-Murtra , Rudolf Hanel , Stefan Thurner

Background: Zipf's law and Heaps' law are two representatives of the scaling concepts, which play a significant role in the study of complexity science. The coexistence of the Zipf's law and the Heaps' law motivates different understandings…

Physics and Society · Physics 2011-05-26 Lin Wang , Xiang Li , Yi-Qing Zhang , Yan Zhang , Kan Zhang

We propose a stochastic model for the number of different words in a given database which incorporates the dependence on the database size and historical changes. The main feature of our model is the existence of two different classes of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-05-16 Martin Gerlach , Eduardo G. Altmann

We study the relationship between vocabulary size and text length in a corpus of $75$ literary works in English, authored by six writers, distinguishing between the contributions of three grammatical classes (or ``tags,'' namely, {\it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-08 Andrés Chacoma , Damián H. Zanette

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-05-09 Horia-Nicolai L. Teodorescu

The frequency distributions of DNA k-mers are shaped by fundamental biological processes and offer a window into genome structure and evolution. Inspired by analogies to natural language, prior studies have attempted to model genomic k-mer…

Quantifying the similarity between symbolic sequences is a traditional problem in Information Theory which requires comparing the frequencies of symbols in different sequences. In numerous modern applications, ranging from DNA over music to…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-04-18 Martin Gerlach , Francesc Font-Clos , Eduardo G. Altmann