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The dependence with text length of the statistical properties of word occurrences has long been considered a severe limitation quantitative linguistics. We propose a simple scaling form for the distribution of absolute word frequencies…
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…
In this paper we combine statistical analysis of large text databases and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. Besides the sublinear scaling of the vocabulary size with…
Zipf's law on word frequency is observed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and so on, yet it does not hold for Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. A model for writing process is proposed to explain the above difference, which takes…
Human language, as a typical complex system, its organization and evolution is an attractive topic for both physical and cultural researchers. In this paper, we present the first exhaustive analysis of the text organization of human speech.…
Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word…
This article investigates scaling laws within language families using data from over six thousand languages and analyzing emergent patterns observed in Zipf-like classification graphs. Both macroscopic (based on number of languages by…
Zipf's law has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law. However, there is much dispute whether it is…
Statistical regularities in human language have fascinated researchers for decades, suggesting deep underlying principles governing its evolution and information structuring for efficient communication. While Zipf's Law describes the…
Background: Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication.…
The Zipf's law establishes that if the words of a (large) text are ordered by decreasing frequency, the frequency versus the rank decreases as a power law with exponent close to $-1$. Previous work has stressed that this pattern arises from…
Of basic interest is the quantification of the long term growth of a language's lexicon as it develops to more completely cover both a culture's communication requirements and knowledge space. Here, we explore the usage dynamics of words in…
Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, has been viewed as a manifestation of compression, i.e. the minimization of the length of forms -- a universal principle of natural communication.…
Zipf's law is a fundamental paradigm in the statistics of written and spoken natural language as well as in other communication systems. We raise the question of the elementary units for which Zipf's law should hold in the most natural way,…
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…
Zipf's law of abbreviation, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, is one of the most solid candidates for a linguistic universal, in the sense that it has the potential for being exceptionless or with a number of exceptions…
An important body of quantitative linguistics is constituted by a series of statistical laws about language usage. Despite the importance of these linguistic laws, some of them are poorly formulated, and, more importantly, there is no…
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…
Present human languages display slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution for size [1-3], whereas present cities follow power law (Pareto-Zipf law)[4]. Our model considers the competition between languages and that between cities…
Scaling properties of language are a useful tool for understanding generative processes in texts. We investigate the scaling relations in citywise Twitter corpora coming from the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United…