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Related papers: Scaling Laws in Human Language

200 papers

Heap's Law states that in a large enough text corpus, the number of types as a function of tokens grows as $N=KM^\beta$ for some free parameters $K,\beta$. Much has been written about how this result and various generalizations can be…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-01-04 Victor Davis

What dynamics govern a time series representing the appearance of words in social media data? In this paper, we investigate an elementary dynamics, from which word-dependent special effects are segregated, such as breaking news, increasing…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-07-31 Hayafumi Watanabe

Zipf's power-law distribution is a generic empirical statistical regularity found in many complex systems. However, rather than universality with a single power-law exponent (equal to 1 for Zipf's law), there are many reported deviations…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-03-18 Ryohei Hisano , Didier Sornette , Takayuki Mizuno

The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-11 Dietrich Stauffer , Christian Schulze

In this paper we quantify the consistency of word usage in written texts represented by complex networks, where words were taken as nodes, by measuring the degree of preservation of the node neighborhood.} Words were considered highly…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-02-19 Diego R. Amancio , Osvaldo N. Oliveira , Luciano da F. Costa

A generic communication model of a boolean network with transmission errors is proposed to explore the power-law scaling of states' evolution in small-world networks. In the model, the power spectrum of the population difference between…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2007-05-23 Jiann-Shing Lih , Jyh-Long Chern

This paper introduces a statistical and other analysis of peer reviewers in order to approach their "quality" through some quantification measure, thereby leading to some quality metrics. Peer reviewer reports for the Journal of the Serbian…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-06-08 Marcel Ausloos , Olgica Nedic , Agata Fronczak , Piotr Fronczak

We demonstrate that the frequency distribution of phonemes across languages can be explained at both macroscopic and microscopic levels. Macroscopically, phoneme rank-frequency distributions closely follow the order statistics of a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Fermín Moscoso del Prado Martín , Suchir Salhan

The word-stock of a language is a complex dynamical system in which words can be created, evolve, and become extinct. Even more dynamic are the short-term fluctuations in word usage by individuals in a population. Building on the recent…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-04-09 Eduardo G. Altmann , Zakary L. Whichard , Adilson E. Motter

Physics seeks to uncover the laws of Nature and express them through mathematical equations. Despite the vast diversity of natural phenomena, physical equations exhibit structural regularities that set them apart from arbitrary mathematical…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-05-11 Andrei Constantin , Deaglan Bartlett , Harry Desmond , Pedro G. Ferreira

In this article, I conduct a textual and contextual analysis of the empirical literature on Zipf's law for cities. Building on previous meta-analysis material openly available, I collect full texts and bibliographies of 66 scientific…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-02-01 Clémentine Cottineau

The evolution of open source software projects in Linux distributions offers a remarkable example of a growing complex self-organizing adaptive system, exhibiting Zipf's law over four full decades. We present three tests of the usually…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2014-08-26 T. Maillart , D. Sornette , S. Spaeth , G. Von Krogh

We analyse correspondence of a text to a simple probabilistic model. The model assumes that the words are selected independently from an infinite dictionary. The probability distribution correspond to the Zipf---Mandelbrot law. We count…

Recent theories suggest that Neural Scaling Laws arise whenever the task is linearly decomposed into power-law distributed units. Alternatively, scaling laws also emerge when data exhibit a hierarchically compositional structure, as is…

Machine Learning · Statistics 2025-05-13 Francesco Cagnetta , Hyunmo Kang , Matthieu Wyart

The distribution of living languages is investigated and scaling relations are found for the diversity of languages as a function of the country area and population. These results are compared with data from Ecology and from computer…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-11 M. A. F. Gomes , G. L. Vasconcelos , I. J. Tsang , I. R. Tsang

The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Tiago Pimentel , Irene Nikkarinen , Kyle Mahowald , Ryan Cotterell , Damián Blasi

We study the problem of entropy calibration, which asks whether a language model's entropy over generations matches its log loss on human text. Past work found that models are miscalibrated, with entropy per step increasing as generations…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-14 Steven Cao , Gregory Valiant , Percy Liang

n-tuple power law widely exists in language, computer program code, DNA and music. After a vast amount of Zipf analyses of n-tuple power law from empirical data, we propose a model to explain the n-tuple power law feature existed in these…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2009-08-05 Xiaocong Gan , Dahui Wang , Zhangang Han

Despite renewed interest in emergent language simulations with neural networks, little is known about the basic properties of the induced code, and how they compare to human language. One fundamental characteristic of the latter, known as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Rahma Chaabouni , Eugene Kharitonov , Emmanuel Dupoux , Marco Baroni

Apparently random events in nature often reveal hidden patterns when analysed using diverse and robust statistical tools. Power-law distributions, for example, project diverse natural phenomenon, ranging from earthquakes1 to heartbeat…