English
Related papers

Related papers: A statistical test for the Zipf's law by deviation…

200 papers

We consider the sequential composite binary hypothesis testing problem in which one of the hypotheses is governed by a single distribution while the other is governed by a family of distributions whose parameters belong to a known set…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-03-30 Jiachun Pan , Yonglong Li , Vincent Y. F. Tan

When following a sequence - such as reading a text or tracking a user's activity - one can measure how the "dictionary" of distinct elements (types) grows with the number of observations (tokens). When this growth follows a power law, it is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-04-21 Célestin Zimmerlin , Thomas Louail , Manuel Moussallam , Marc Barthelemy

We present a simple structure based model of how words are formed from morphemes. The model explains two major empirical facts: the typical distribution of word lengths and the appearance of Zipf like rank frequency curves. In contrast to…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Vladimir Berman

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-05-19 Qunzhi Zhang , Didier Sornette

Recent studies have investigated siamese network architectures for learning invariant speech representations using same-different side information at the word level. Here we investigate systematically an often ignored component of siamese…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-08-24 Rachid Riad , Corentin Dancette , Julien Karadayi , Neil Zeghidour , Thomas Schatz , Emmanuel Dupoux

In this second part of our survey on the social and natural distributions, we investigate some models, which intend to explain the statistical regularity of the natural and social distributions. There is a large variety of models and in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-07-05 L. Benguigui , M. Marinov

Fix two words over the binary alphabet $\{0,1\}$, and generate iid Bernoulli$(p)$ bits until one of the words occurs in sequence. This setup, commonly known as Penney's ante, was popularized by Conway, who found (in unpublished work) a…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2024-10-01 Mathew Drexel , Xuanshan Peng , Jacob Richey

The distributions of the number of occurrences of words (the distributions of words for short) play key roles in information theory, statistics, probability theory, ergodic theory, computer science, and DNA analysis. Bassino et al. 2010 and…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2022-11-16 Hayato Takahashi

Although Zipf's law is widespread in natural and social data, one often encounters situations where one or both ends of the ranked data deviate from the power-law function. Previously we proposed the Beta rank function to improve the…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2017-05-03 Oscar Fontanelli , Pedro Miramontes , Yaning Yang , Germinal Cocho , Wentian Li

We present a theoretical and empirical investigation of the statistical behaviour of the words in a text produced by human language. To this aim, we analyse the word distribution of various texts of Italian language selected from a specific…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-04-15 Diederik Aerts , Jonito Aerts Arguëlles , Lester Beltran , Massimiliano Sassoli de Bianchi , Sandro Sozzo

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

Construct recursively a long string of words w1. .. wn, such that at each step k, w k+1 is a new word with a fixed probability p $\in$ (0, 1), and repeats some preceding word with complementary probability 1 -- p. More precisely, given a…

Probability · Mathematics 2019-06-26 Jean Bertoin

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-like distributions characterize a wide set of phenomena in physics, biology, economics and social sciences. In human activities, Zipf-laws describe for example the frequency of words appearance in a text or the purchases types in…

Scaling properties of language are a useful tool for understanding generative processes in texts. We investigate the scaling relations in citywise Twitter corpora coming from the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-03-12 Eszter Bokányi , Dániel Kondor , Gábor Vattay

We study the asymptotic behavior of the Hopf characteristic function of fractals and chaotic dynamical systems in the limit of large argument. The small argument behavior is determined by the moments, since the characteristic function is…

Chaotic Dynamics · Physics 2012-07-30 Zachary Guralnik , Cengiz Pehlevan , Gerald Guralnik

We show that statistical criticality, i.e. the occurrence of power law frequency distributions, arises in samples that are maximally informative about the underlying generating process. In order to reach this conclusion, we first identify…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2019-07-09 Ryan John Cubero , Junghyo Jo , Matteo Marsili , Yasser Roudi , Juyong Song

Apparently random events in nature often reveal hidden patterns when analysed using diverse and robust statistical tools. Power-law distributions, for example, project diverse natural phenomenon, ranging from earthquakes1 to heartbeat…

We focus on the statistics of word occurrences and of the waiting times between such occurrences in Blogs. Due to the heterogeneity of words' frequencies, the empirical analysis is performed by studying classes of "frequently-equivalent"…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2012-09-25 R. Lambiotte , M. Ausloos , M. Thelwall

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.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-09-26 Charlotte James , Sandro Azaele , Amos Maritan , Filippo Simini