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Related papers: Explaining Zipf's Law via Mental Lexicon

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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

We model certain features of human language complexity by means of advanced concepts borrowed from statistical mechanics. Using a time series approach, the diffusion entropy method (DE), we compute the complexity of an Italian corpus of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-11-23 Paolo Allegrini , Paolo Grigolini , Luigi Palatella

We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two…

Physics and Society · Physics 2012-12-12 Alexander M. Petersen , Joel N. Tenenbaum , Shlomo Havlin , H. Eugene Stanley , Matjaz Perc

In this paper we try to model certain features of human language complexity by means of advanced concepts borrowed from statistical mechanics. We use a time series approach, the diffusion entropy method (DE), to compute the complexity of an…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-09-03 Paolo Allegrini , Paolo Grigolini , Luigi Palatella

We summarize a book under publication with his title written by the three present authors, on the theory of Zipf's law, and more generally of power laws, driven by the mechanism of proportional growth. The preprint is available upon request…

General Finance · Quantitative Finance 2014-08-26 A. Saichev , Y. Malevergne , D. Sornette

In the setting of minimal local grammar-based coding, the input string is represented as a grammar with the minimal output length defined via simple symbol-by-symbol encoding. This paper discusses four contributions to this field. First, we…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-04-17 Łukasz Dębowski

Time evolution of the cities and of the languages is considered in terms of multiplicative noise and fragmentation processes; where power law (Pareto-Zipf law) and slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution result for the size…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 C. Tuncay

One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Li-Min Wang , Sun-Ting Tsai , Shan-Jyun Wu , Meng-Xue Tsai , Daw-Wei Wang , Yi-Ching Su , Tzay-Ming Hong

In the last years, researchers have realized the difficulties of fitting power-law distributions properly. These difficulties are higher in Zipf's systems, due to the discreteness of the variables and to the existence of two representations…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2022-11-29 Alvaro Corral , Isabel Serra , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

The Zipf distribution is a probability distribution widely used by scientists from various disciplines due to its ubiquity. Some of these areas include linguistics, physics, genetics, and sociology, among others. In this paper, it is proved…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2025-11-17 Marta Pérez-Casany , Ariel Duarte-López , Jordi Valero

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

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-02-02 Maelyson R. F. Santos , Marcelo A. F. Gomes

Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Shuiyuan Yu , Chunshan Xu , Haitao Liu

History-dependent processes are ubiquitous in natural and social systems. Many such stochastic processes, especially those that are associated with complex systems, become more constrained as they unfold, meaning that their sample-space, or…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-04-16 Bernat Corominas-Murtra , Rudolf Hanel , Stefan Thurner

We observe the statistical properties of blogs that are expected to reflect social human interaction. Firstly, we introduce a basic normalization preprocess that enables us to evaluate the genuine word frequency in blogs that are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2010-04-09 Yukie Sano , Misako Takayasu

Recent works have highlighted optimization difficulties faced by gradient descent in training the first and last layers of transformer-based language models, which are overcome by optimizers such as Adam. These works suggest that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Frederik Kunstner , Francis Bach

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

We address the role of multiplicative stochastic processes in modeling the occurrence of power-law city size distributions. As an explanation of the result of Zipf's rank analysis, Simon's model is presented in a mathematically elementary…

Physics and Society · Physics 2007-05-23 Damian H. Zanette

We present an extensive analysis of long-term statistics of the queries to websites using logs collected on several web caches in Russian academic networks and on US IRCache caches. We check the sensitivity of the statistics to several…

Networking and Internet Architecture · Computer Science 2007-05-23 Serge A. Krashakov , Anton B. Teslyuk , Lev N. Shchur

Hilberg (1990) supposed that finite-order excess entropy of a random human text is proportional to the square root of the text length. Assuming that Hilberg's hypothesis is true, we derive Guiraud's law, which states that the number of word…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Łukasz Dȩbowski