Related papers: Asymptotically normal estimators for Zipf's law

The growth dynamics of complex systems often exhibit statistical regularities involving power-law relationships. For real finite complex systems formed by countable tokens (animals, words) as instances of distinct types (species, dictionary…

Using data from gene expression databases on various organisms and tissues, including yeast, nematodes, human normal and cancer tissues, and embryonic stem cells, we found that the abundances of expressed genes exhibit a power-law…

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…

This article presents the calculation of the entropy of a system with Zipfian distribution and shows that a communication system tends to present an exponent value close to one, but still greater than one, so that it might maximize entropy…

Zipf's law states that the frequency of an observation with a given value is inversely proportional to the square of that value; Taylor's law, instead, describes the scaling between fluctuations in the size of a population and its mean.…

Zipf's law is a paradigm describing the importance of different elements in communication systems, especially in linguistics. Despite the complexity of the hierarchical structure of language, music has in some sense an even more complex…

It is traditionally assumed that Zipf's law implies the power-law growth of the number of different elements with the total number of elements in a system - the so-called Heaps' law. We show that a careful definition of Zipf's law leads to…

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…

This paper studies the limits of language models' statistical learning in the context of Zipf's law. First, we demonstrate that Zipf-law token distribution emerges irrespective of the chosen tokenization. Second, we show that Zipf…

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…

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…

We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical…

We propose a new method for the calculation of the statistical properties, as e.g. the entropy, of unknown generators of symbolic sequences. The probability distribution p(k) of the elements k of a population can be approximated by the…

Zipf's power law is a general empirical regularity found in many natural and social systems. A recently developed theory predicts that Zipf's law corresponds to systems that are growing according to a maximally sustainable path in the…

We propose a new method for the calculation of the statistical properties, as e.g. the entropy, of unknown generators of symbolic sequences. The probability distribution $p(k)$ of the elements $k$ of a population can be approximated by the…

Stopwords are words that are not very informative to the content or the meaning of a language text. Most stopwords are function words but can also be common verbs, adjectives and adverbs. In contrast to the well known Zipf's law 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…

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…

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…

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…