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Zipf's power-law distribution is a generic empirical statistical regularity found in many complex systems. However, rather than universality with a single power-law exponent (equal to 1 for Zipf's law), there are many reported deviations…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-03-18 Ryohei Hisano , Didier Sornette , Takayuki Mizuno

Zipf's law in its basic incarnation is an empirical probability distribution governing the frequency of usage of words in a language. As Terence Tao recently remarked, it still lacks a convincing and satisfactory mathematical explanation.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-04-30 Yuri I. Manin

In the last years, researchers have realized the difficulties of fitting power-law distributions properly. These difficulties are higher in Zipf's systems, due to the discreteness of the variables and to the existence of two representations…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2022-11-29 Alvaro Corral , Isabel Serra , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

The article presents a new interpretation for Zipf-Mandelbrot's law in natural language which rests on two areas of information theory. Firstly, we construct a new class of grammar-based codes and, secondly, we investigate properties of…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-03-11 Łukasz Dębowski

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-01-08 Ruokuang Lin , Qianli D. Y. Ma , Chunhua Bian

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

In this study, Nobel Laureate Orhan Pamuk's works are chosen as examples of Turkish literature. By counting the number of letters and words in his texts, we find it possible to study his works statistically. It has been known that there is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-13 Taner Arsan , Sehnaz Sismanoglu Simsek , Onder Pekcan

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

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…

Scientific cooperation on an international level has been well studied in the literature. However, much less is known about this cooperation on the intercontinental level. In this paper, we address this issue by creating a collection of…

Digital Libraries · Computer Science 2023-11-28 Malgorzata J. Krawczyk , Krzysztof Malarz

The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Stephan C. Meylan , Thomas L. Griffiths

It turns out that some empirical facts in Big Data are the effects of properties of large numbers. Zipf's law 'noise' is an example of such an artefact. We expose several properties of the power law distributions and of similar distribution…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-05-09 Horia-Nicolai L. Teodorescu

We inspect the deductive connection between the neural scaling law and Zipf's law -- two statements discussed in machine learning and quantitative linguistics. The neural scaling law describes how the cross entropy rate of a foundation…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Łukasz Dębowski

Background: Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2009-11-11 Eduardo G. Altmann , Janet B. Pierrehumbert , Adilson E. Motter

According to Zipf's meaning-frequency law, words that are more frequent tend to have more meanings. Here it is shown that a linear dependency between the frequency of a form and its number of meanings is found in a family of models of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-10-14 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

We give an algorithm A which assigns probabilities to logical sentences. For any simple infinite sequence of sentences whose truth-values appear indistinguishable from a biased coin that outputs "true" with probability p, we have that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2015-10-13 Scott Garrabrant , Siddharth Bhaskar , Abram Demski , Joanna Garrabrant , George Koleszarik , Evan Lloyd

In this paper the Zipf-Mandelbrot law is revisited in the context of linguistics. Despite its widespread popularity the Zipf--Mandelbrot law can only describe the statistical behaviour of a rather restricted fraction of the total number of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-07 Marcelo A. Montemurro

In this paper we will look at the distribution with which passwords are chosen. Zipf's Law is commonly observed in lists of chosen words. Using password lists from four different on-line sources, we will investigate if Zipf's law is a good…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-09-02 David Malone , Kevin Maher

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

Which statistical features distinguish a meaningful text (possibly written in an unknown system) from a meaningless set of symbols? Here we answer this question by comparing features of the first half of a text to its second half. This…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-07-18 Weibing Deng , R. Xie , S. Deng , Armen E. Allahverdyan