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Languages across the world exhibit Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely more frequent words tend to be shorter. The generalized version of the law - an inverse relationship between the frequency of a unit and its magnitude - holds also for…
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…
The problem of compression in standard information theory consists of assigning codes as short as possible to numbers. Here we consider the problem of optimal coding -- under an arbitrary coding scheme -- and show that it predicts Zipf's…
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.…
Here we sketch a new derivation of Zipf's law for word frequencies based on optimal coding. The structure of the derivation is reminiscent of Mandelbrot's random typing model but it has multiple advantages over random typing: (1) it starts…
What fascinates us about animal behavior is its richness and complexity, but understanding behavior and its neural basis requires a simpler description. Traditionally, simplification has been imposed by training animals to engage in a…
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…
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…
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,…
Despite renewed interest in emergent language simulations with neural networks, little is known about the basic properties of the induced code, and how they compare to human language. One fundamental characteristic of the latter, known as…
A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more than a decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies. The family is a based on a combination of two information theoretic principles:…
Words follow the law of brevity, i.e. more frequent words tend to be shorter. From a statistical point of view, this qualitative definition of the law states that word length and word frequency are negatively correlated. Here the recent…
Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and…
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…
Empirical observations indicate striking similarities among locomotion in terrestrial animals, birds, and fish, but unifying physical grounds are lacking. When applied to efficient locomotion, the analytical mechanics principle of minimum…
Human language, the most powerful communication system in history, is closely associated with cognition. Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how…
Apparently random events in nature often reveal hidden patterns when analysed using diverse and robust statistical tools. Power-law distributions, for example, project diverse natural phenomenon, ranging from earthquakes1 to heartbeat…
The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…
Parallels of Zipf's law of brevity, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, have been found in bottlenose dolphins and Formosan macaques. Although these findings suggest that behavioral repertoires are shaped by a general…
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…