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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

A curious observation was made that the rank statistics of scientific citation numbers follows Zipf-Mandelbrot's law. The same pow-like behavior is exhibited by some simple random citation models. The observed regularity indicates not so…

Physics and Society · Physics 2007-05-23 Z. K. Silagadze

Zipf's law is shown to arise as the variational solution of a problem formulated in Fisher's terms. An appropriate minimization process involving Fisher information and scale-invariance yields this universal rank distribution. As an example…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-05-13 A. Hernando , D. Puigdomenech , D. Villuendas , C. Vesperinas , A. Plastino

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

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

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

In a prime number decomposition of integers in a given set, the occurrence frequencies of prime numbers are shown to satisfy a general forms of Zipf's law.

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-03-20 Helmut Satz

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…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-05-03 Linyuan Lu , Zi-Ke Zhang , Tao Zhou

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

We perform a quantitative analysis of extensive chess databases and show that the frequencies of opening moves are distributed according to a power-law with an exponent that increases linearly with the game depth, whereas the pooled…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-18 B. Blasius , R. Toenjes

This paper studies the limits of language models' statistical learning in the context of Zipf's law. First, we demonstrate that Zipf-law token distribution emerges irrespective of the chosen tokenization. Second, we show that Zipf…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-22 Elizaveta Zhemchuzhina , Nikolai Filippov , Ivan P. Yamshchikov

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

This work proves that ranks and shares are statistically dependent on one another, based on simple combinatorics. It presents a formula for rank-share distribution and illustrates that Zipfs law, is descended from expected values of various…

Other Statistics · Statistics 2017-05-24 A Shyklo

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 word embedding space in neural models is skewed, and correcting this can improve task performance. We point out that most approaches for modeling, correcting, and measuring the symmetry of an embedding space implicitly assume that the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Sho Yokoi , Han Bao , Hiroto Kurita , Hidetoshi Shimodaira

English words and the outputs of many other natural processes are well-known to follow a Zipf distribution. Yet this thoroughly-established property has never been shown to help compress or predict these important processes. We show that…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2015-05-04 Moein Falahatgar , Ashkan Jafarpour , Alon Orlitsky , Venkatadheeraj Pichapati , Ananda Theertha Suresh

The joint probability distribution of many degrees of freedom in biological systems, such as firing patterns in neural networks or antibody sequence composition in zebrafish, often follow Zipf's law, where a power law is observed on a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-08-13 David J. Schwab , Ilya Nemenman , Pankaj Mehta

When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2019-09-23 M. E. J. Newman

A plethora of natural and socio-economic phenomena share a striking statistical regularity, that is the magnitude of elements decreases with a power law as a function of their position in a ranking of magnitude. Such regularity is known as…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-10-16 Davide Cugini , André Timpanaro , Giacomo Livan , Giacomo Guarnieri

For words, rank-frequency distributions have long been heralded for adherence to a potentially-universal phenomenon known as Zipf's law. The hypothetical form of this empirical phenomenon was refined by Ben\^{i}ot Mandelbrot to that which…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-24 Jake Ryland Williams , Giovanni C. Santia