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Related papers: Optimization models of natural communication

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We investigate the origin of Zipf's law for words in written texts by means of a stochastic dynamical model for text generation. The model incorporates both features related to the general structure of languages and memory effects inherent…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Damián H. Zanette , Marcelo A. Montemurro

In this paper, we propose an optimization-based mechanism to explain power law distributions, where the function that the optimization process is seeking to optimize is derived mathematically, then the behavior and interpretation of this…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-27 A. M. Khalili

The Zipf's law is the major regularity of statistical linguistics that served as a prototype for rank-frequency relations and scaling laws in natural sciences. Here we show that the Zipf's law -- together with its applicability for a single…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2015-06-15 Armen E. Allahverdyan , Weibing Deng , Q. A. Wang

Understanding the innovation process, that is the underlying mechanisms through which novelties emerge, diffuse and trigger further novelties is undoubtedly of fundamental importance in many areas (biology, linguistics, social science and…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-10-29 Giacomo Aletti , Irene Crimaldi

Zipf's law, which states that the probability of an observation is inversely proportional to its rank, has been observed in many domains. While there are models that explain Zipf's law in each of them, those explanations are typically…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2016-07-06 Laurence Aitchison , Nicola Corradi , Peter E. Latham

Zipf's law is the main regularity of quantitative linguistics. Despite of many works devoted to foundations of this law, it is still unclear whether it is only a statistical regularity, or it has deeper relations with information-carrying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Weibing Deng , Armen E. Allahverdyan

The word-frequency distribution provides the fundamental building blocks that generate discourse in language. It is well known, from empirical evidence, that the word-frequency distribution of almost any text is described by Zipf's law, at…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-11-09 Alvaro Corral , Montserrat Garcia del Muro

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sonia Petrini , Antoni Casas-i-Muñoz , Jordi Cluet-i-Martinell , Mengxue Wang , Christian Bentz , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

Zipf's law is a fundamental paradigm in the statistics of written and spoken natural language as well as in other communication systems. We raise the question of the elementary units for which Zipf's law should hold in the most natural way,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-07-14 Alvaro Corral , Gemma Boleda , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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

Zipf's law describes the empirical size distribution of the components of many systems in natural and social sciences and humanities. We show, by solving a statistical model, that Zipf's law co-occurs with the maximization of the diversity…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-10-05 Onofrio Mazzarisi , Amanda de Azevedo-Lopes , Jeferson J. Arenzon , Federico Corberi

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

We study the cost-minimization problem posed by Ferrer i Cancho and Sol\'e in their model of communication that aimed at explaining the origin of Zipf's law [PNAS 100, 788 (2003)]. Direct analysis shows that the minimum cost is $\min…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2013-04-09 Ronald Dickman , Nicholas R. Moloney , Eduardo G. Altmann

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Michael S. Vitevitch

We checked that the distribution of words in text should uniform, which gives Heaps' law as natural result, that is, the number of types of words can be expressed as a power law of the number of tokens within text. We developed a…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-04-16 Kim Chol-jun

An important body of quantitative linguistics is constituted by a series of statistical laws about language usage. Despite the importance of these linguistic laws, some of them are poorly formulated, and, more importantly, there is no…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-11-09 Alvaro Corral , Isabel Serra

The minimization of the length of syntactic dependencies is a well-established principle of word order and the basis of a mathematical theory of word order. Here we complete that theory from the perspective of information theory, adding a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-09-05 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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

Information theory is introduced in this lecture note with a particular emphasis on its relevance to algebraic coding theory. The document develops the mathematical foundations for quantifying uncertainty and information transmission by…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-08 El Mahdi Mouloua , Essaid Mohamed

Information theory is a mathematical theory of learning with deep connections with topics as diverse as artificial intelligence, statistical physics, and biological evolution. Many primers on information theory paint a broad picture with…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2019-03-26 Philip Chodrow