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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

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, 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 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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-11-20 Marc Serra-Peralta , Joan Serrà , Álvaro Corral

Many complex systems are composed of disparate, interacting types of varying sizes: Species abundances in ecosystems, firm sizes in markets, city populations in countries, word counts in language, etc. A longstanding mystery of complex…

The binary many-step Markov chain with the step-like memory function is considered as a model for the analysis of rank distributions of words in stochastic symbolic dynamical systems. We prove that the envelope curve for this distribution…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 K. E. Kechedzhy O. V. Usatenko , V. A. Yampol'skii

Languages across the world exhibit Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely more frequent words tend to be shorter. The generalized version of the law - an inverse relationship between the frequency of a unit and its magnitude - holds also for…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-05-05 R. Ferrer-i-Cancho , C. Bentz , C. Seguin

Zipf's law is a hallmark of several complex systems with a modular structure, such as books composed by words or genomes composed by genes. In these component systems, Zipf's law describes the empirical power law distribution of component…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-12-05 Andrea Mazzolini , Alberto Colliva , Michele Caselle , Matteo Osella

The frequency distributions of DNA k-mers are shaped by fundamental biological processes and offer a window into genome structure and evolution. Inspired by analogies to natural language, prior studies have attempted to model genomic k-mer…

The Zipf's law establishes that if the words of a (large) text are ordered by decreasing frequency, the frequency versus the rank decreases as a power law with exponent close to $-1$. Previous work has stressed that this pattern arises from…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-04-03 Felipe Urbina , Javier Vera

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

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

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

In Phys. Rev. Letters (73:2, 5 Dec. 94), Mantegna et al. conclude on the basis of Zipf rank frequency data that noncoding DNA sequence regions are more like natural languages than coding regions. We argue on the contrary that an empirical…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2009-09-25 Partha Niyogi , Robert C. Berwick

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

We show how generalized Gibbs-Shannon entropies can provide new insights on the statistical properties of texts. The universal distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) implies that the generalized entropies, computed at the word level,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-02-15 Eduardo G. Altmann , Laercio Dias , Martin Gerlach

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

Sentence formation is a highly structured, history-dependent, and sample-space reducing (SSR) process. While the first word in a sentence can be chosen from the entire vocabulary, typically, the freedom of choosing subsequent words gets…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Rudolf Hanel , Stefan Thurner

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

The article discusses the frequency of characters of Oracle,concluding that the frequency and the rank of a word or character is fit to Zipf-Mandelboit Law or Zipf's law with three parameters,and figuring out the parameters based on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2014-12-10 Xiuli Wang