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Related papers: Explaining Zipf's Law via Mental Lexicon

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We present an impossibility result, called a theorem about facts and words, which pertains to a general communication system. The theorem states that the number of distinct words used in a finite text is roughly greater than the number of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-03 Łukasz Dębowski

In this paper we quantify the statistical properties and dynamics of the frequency of hashtag use on Twitter. Hashtags are special words used in social media to attract attention and to organize content. Looking at the collection of all…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-06-04 Hongjia H. Chen , Tristram J. Alexander , Diego F. M. Oliveira , Eduardo G. Altmann

Power law distributions characterise several natural and social phenomena. The Zipf law for cities is one of those. The study views the question of whether that global regularity is independent of different spatial distributions of cities.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-06-09 Rolf Bergs

The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household ($\sim 10^{-2}$ km) to continental ($\sim 10^4$ km) scales. Empirical data indicates simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-03-23 Henry W. Lin , Abraham Loeb

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…

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

A new angle of view is proposed to find the simple rules dominating complex systems and regular patterns behind random phenomena such as cities. Hierarchy of cities reflects the ubiquitous structure frequently observed in the natural world…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-21 Yanguang Chen

Sentence formation is a highly structured, history-dependent, and sample-space reducing (SSR) process. While the first word in a sentence can be chosen from the entire vocabulary, typically, the freedom of choosing subsequent words gets…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Rudolf Hanel , Stefan Thurner

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

Stopwords are words that are not very informative to the content or the meaning of a language text. Most stopwords are function words but can also be common verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In contrast to the well known Zipf's law for…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Wentian Li , Oscar Fontanelli

Zipf's law in the field of linguistics is tested in the nuclear disassembly within the framework of isospin dependent lattice gas model. It is found that the average cluster charge (or mass) of rank $n$ in the charge (or mass) list shows…

Nuclear Theory · Physics 2007-05-23 Y. G. Ma

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…

Computational Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Caglar Tuncay

It has been shown recently that a specific class of path-dependent stochastic processes, which reduce their sample space as they unfold, lead to exact scaling laws in frequency and rank distributions. Such Sample Space Reducing processes…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-10-02 Bernat Corominas-Murtra , Rudolf Hanel , Stefan Thurner

When following a sequence - such as reading a text or tracking a user's activity - one can measure how the "dictionary" of distinct elements (types) grows with the number of observations (tokens). When this growth follows a power law, it is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-04-21 Célestin Zimmerlin , Thomas Louail , Manuel Moussallam , Marc Barthelemy

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

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

The review summarizes the main methodological concepts used in studying natural language from the perspective of complexity science and documents their applicability in identifying both universal and system-specific features of language in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-01-09 Tomasz Stanisz , Stanisław Drożdż , Jarosław Kwapień

By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…

Physics and Society · Physics 2012-12-10 Matjaz Perc

As the most fundamental empirical law, Zipf's law has been studied from many aspects. But its meaning is still an open problem. Some models have been constructed to explain Zipf's law. In the letter, a new concept named nonsymmetric entropy…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2007-05-23 Chengshi Liu

Data of proportional elections show a striking feature: If the parties are ranked according to the number of their voters, the number of votes grows exponentially with the rank of the party. This so-called Zipf's law has been reported…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-03-30 Volker Hösel , Johannes Müller , Aurélien Tellier