English
Related papers

Related papers: Zipf's law arises naturally in structured, high-di…

200 papers

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

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

Zipf's law for cities is probably the most famous regularity in social sciences. So much that, a hundred years of publication later, its status is not clear: is it a law of social organisation? Is it an instrument of description of city…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-10-10 Clementine Cottineau

Most of various large-size complex systems in nature and society can be well described as complex networks (graphs) to better understand the evolutional mechanisms and dynamical functions behind themselves. Of some part follow scale-free…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-08-08 Fei Ma

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

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Sonia Petrini , Antoni Casas-i-Muñoz , Jordi Cluet-i-Martinell , Mengxue Wang , Chris Bentz , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2015-05-19 Bernat Corominas-Murtra , Jordi Fortuny , Ricard V. Solé

Zipf's law of city-size distributions can be expressed by three types of mathematical models: one-parameter form, two-parameter form, and three-parameter form. The one-parameter and one of the two-parameter models are familiar to urban…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-19 Yanguang Chen

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 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

Natural languages are full of rules and exceptions. One of the most famous quantitative rules is Zipf's law which states that the frequency of occurrence of a word is approximately inversely proportional to its rank. Though this `law' of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-05-27 Jake Ryland Williams , James P. Bagrow , Christopher M. Danforth , Peter Sheridan Dodds

The rank-size regularity known as Zipf's law is one of scaling laws and frequently observed within the natural living world and in social institutions. Many scientists tried to derive the rank-size scaling relation by entropy-maximizing…

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

In this paper we will look at the distribution with which passwords are chosen. Zipf's Law is commonly observed in lists of chosen words. Using password lists from four different on-line sources, we will investigate if Zipf's law is a good…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-09-02 David Malone , Kevin Maher

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

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:…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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

An Atlas model is a rank-based system of continuous semimartingales for which the steady-state values of the processes follow a power law, or Pareto distribution. For a power law, the log-log plot of these steady-state values versus rank is…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2016-03-01 Ricardo T. Fernholz , Robert Fernholz

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

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

We introduce a non-growth model that generates the power-law distribution with the Zipf exponent. There are N elements, each of which is characterized by a quantity, and at each time step these quantities are redistributed through binary…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2012-04-27 Suhan Ree