Related papers: Statistical laws in linguistics
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…
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…
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…
Human language, as a typical complex system, its organization and evolution is an attractive topic for both physical and cultural researchers. In this paper, we present the first exhaustive analysis of the text organization of human speech.…
Complex natural and technological systems can be considered, on a coarse-grained level, as assemblies of elementary components: for example, genomes as sets of genes, or texts as sets of words. On one hand, the joint occurrence of…
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…
Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…
Some authors have recently argued that a finite-size scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions cannot be conceptually valid. Here we give solid quantitative evidence for the validity of such scaling law,…
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.…
Quantitative linguistics has been allowed, in the last few decades, within the admittedly blurry boundaries of the field of complex systems. A growing host of applied mathematicians and statistical physicists devote their efforts to…
The importance of statistical patterns of language has been debated over decades. Although Zipf's law is perhaps the most popular case, recently, Menzerath's law has begun to be involved. Menzerath's law manifests in language, music and…
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…
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…
We demonstrate that large texts, representing human (English, Russian, Ukrainian) and artificial (C++, Java) languages, display quantitative patterns characterized by the Benford-like and Zipf laws. The frequency of a word following the…
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…
The prevailing maximum likelihood estimators for inferring power law models from rank-frequency data are biased. The source of this bias is an inappropriate likelihood function. The correct likelihood function is derived and shown to be…
Physics seeks to uncover the laws of Nature and express them through mathematical equations. Despite the vast diversity of natural phenomena, physical equations exhibit structural regularities that set them apart from arbitrary mathematical…
In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its…
In a language corpus, the probability that a word occurs $n$ times is often proportional to $1/n^2$. Assigning rank, $s$, to words according to their abundance, $\log s$ vs $\log n$ typically has a slope of minus one. That simple Zipf's law…
The structure of very complicated irregular "microscopic" (local) entropy fluctuations around a big separated "macroscopic" (global) fluctuation in the statistical equilibrium was studied in numerical experiments on a simple 2--freedom…