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Related papers: Log-log Convexity of Type-Token Growth in Zipf's S…

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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,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-31 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-04-29 Alessandro Bellina , Vito D. P. Servedio

Zipf's law is found when the vocabulary of long written texts is ranked according to the frequency of word occurrences, establishing a power-law decay for the frequency vs rank relation. This law is a robust statistical property observed…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-02-17 Juan Ignacio Perotti , Orlando Vito Billoni

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

The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf's law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the power law exponent converges strongly to $-1$ as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-04-20 Richard Perline , Ronald Perline

We study the relationship between vocabulary size and text length in a corpus of $75$ literary works in English, authored by six writers, distinguishing between the contributions of three grammatical classes (or ``tags,'' namely, {\it…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-08 Andrés Chacoma , Damián H. Zanette

Zipf's, Heaps' and Taylor's laws are ubiquitous in many different systems where innovation processes are at play. Together, they represent a compelling set of stylized facts regarding the overall statistics, the innovation rate and the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-11-14 Francesca Tria , Vittorio Loreto , Vito D. P. Servedio

Zipf's law in language lacks a definitive origin, debated across fields. This study explains Zipf-like behavior using geometric mechanisms without linguistic elements. The Full Combinatorial Word Model (FCWM) forms words from a finite…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-27 Vladimir Berman

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Christian Bentz , Caio Seguin

Why does Zipf's law give a good description of data from seemingly completely unrelated phenomena? Here it is argued that the reason is that they can all be described as outcomes of a ubiquitous random group division: the elements can be…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-03-19 Seung Ki Baek , Sebastian Bernhardsson , Petter Minnhagen

Heaps' or Herdan's law characterizes the word-type vs. word-token relation by a power-law function, which is concave in linear-linear scale but a straight line in log-log scale. However, it has been observed that even in log-log scale, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-27 Oscar Fontanelli , Wentian Li

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

Power-law distributions with various exponents are studied. We first introduce a simple and generic model that reproduces Zipf's law. We can regard this model both as the time evolution of the population of cities and that of the asset…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Kenji Kawamura , Naomichi Hatano

The joint probability distribution of many degrees of freedom in biological systems, such as firing patterns in neural networks or antibody sequence composition in zebrafish, often follow Zipf's law, where a power law is observed on a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-08-13 David J. Schwab , Ilya Nemenman , Pankaj Mehta

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

A set of data with positive values follows a Pareto distribution if the log-log plot of value versus rank is approximately a straight line. A Pareto distribution satisfies Zipf's law if the log-log plot has a slope of -1. Since many types…

Economics · Quantitative Finance 2020-06-04 Ricardo T. Fernholz , Robert Fernholz

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

The performance of deep learning in natural language processing has been spectacular, but the reasons for this success remain unclear because of the inherent complexity of deep learning. This paper provides empirical evidence of its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-02-07 Shuntaro Takahashi , Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii

The formation of sentences is a highly structured and history-dependent process. The probability of using a specific word in a sentence strongly depends on the 'history' of word-usage earlier in that sentence. We study a simple…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-05-28 Stefan Thurner , Rudolf Hanel , Bo Liu , Bernat Corominas-Murtra

Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…