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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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-06-15 Francesc Font-Clos , Gemma Boleda , Álvaro Corral

Zipf's law is just one out of many universal laws proposed to describe statistical regularities in language. Here we review and critically discuss how these laws can be statistically interpreted, fitted, and tested (falsified). The modern…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-05-27 Eduardo G. Altmann , Martin Gerlach

The task of text segmentation may be undertaken at many levels in text analysis---paragraphs, sentences, words, or even letters. Here, we focus on a relatively fine scale of segmentation, hypothesizing it to be in accord with a stochastic…

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…

Tokenization is a fundamental step in natural language processing (NLP) and other sequence modeling domains, where the choice of vocabulary size significantly impacts model performance. Despite its importance, selecting an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yanjin He , Qingkai Zeng , Meng Jiang

The article discusses the frequency of characters of Oracle,concluding that the frequency and the rank of a word or character is fit to Zipf-Mandelboit Law or Zipf's law with three parameters,and figuring out the parameters based on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2014-12-10 Xiuli Wang

We present a simple structure based model of how words are formed from morphemes. The model explains two major empirical facts: the typical distribution of word lengths and the appearance of Zipf like rank frequency curves. In contrast to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Vladimir Berman

Bayesian modelling and statistical text analysis rely on informed probability priors to encourage good solutions. This paper empirically analyses whether text in medical discharge reports follow Zipf's law, a commonly assumed statistical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Juan C Quiroz , Liliana Laranjo , Catalin Tufanaru , Ahmet Baki Kocaballi , Dana Rezazadegan , Shlomo Berkovsky , Enrico Coiera

The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf's law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the power law exponent converges strongly to $-1$ as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-04-20 Richard Perline , Ronald Perline

In this paper the Zipf-Mandelbrot law is revisited in the context of linguistics. Despite its widespread popularity the Zipf--Mandelbrot law can only describe the statistical behaviour of a rather restricted fraction of the total number of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-07 Marcelo A. Montemurro

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

We consider the problem of inferring the probability distribution associated with a language, given data consisting of an infinite sequence of elements of the languge. We do this under two assumptions on the algorithms concerned: (i) like a…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2014-07-16 Paul M. B. Vitanyi , Nick Chater

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

Zipf's law, and power laws in general, have attracted and continue to attract considerable attention in a wide variety of disciplines - from astronomy to demographics to software structure to economics to linguistics to zoology, and even…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-05-10 Matt Visser

Zipf's law predicts a power-law relationship between word rank and frequency in language communication systems and has been widely reported in a variety of natural language processing applications. However, the emergence of natural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-05 Bohdan Khomtchouk , Shyam Sudhakaran

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

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

We inspect the deductive connection between the neural scaling law and Zipf's law -- two statements discussed in machine learning and quantitative linguistics. The neural scaling law describes how the cross entropy rate of a foundation…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Łukasz Dębowski

The task of finding a criterion allowing to distinguish a text from an arbitrary set of words is rather relevant in itself, for instance, in the aspect of development of means for internet-content indexing or separating signals and noise in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2007-10-02 D. V. Lande , A. A. Snarskii

It is shown that the distribution of low variability periods in the activity of human heart rate typically follows a multi-scaling Zipf's law. The presence or failure of a power law, as well as the values of the scaling exponents, are…

Medical Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 J. Kalda , M. Sakki , M. Vainu , M. Laan