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We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-25 Vladimir Berman

Zipf's law is found when the vocabulary of long written texts is ranked according to the frequency of word occurrences, establishing a power-law decay for the frequency vs rank relation. This law is a robust statistical property observed…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-02-17 Juan Ignacio Perotti , Orlando Vito Billoni

The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-16 Michael Ramscar

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…

We investigate the origin of Zipf's law for words in written texts by means of a stochastic dynamical model for text generation. The model incorporates both features related to the general structure of languages and memory effects inherent…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Damián H. Zanette , Marcelo A. Montemurro

Zipf's law is the most common statistical distribution displaying scaling behavior. Cities, populations or firms are just examples of this seemingly universal law. Although many different models have been proposed, no general theoretical…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2010-07-05 Bernat Corominas Murtra , Ricard Solé

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-11-27 Vladimir Berman

The performance of deep learning in natural language processing has been spectacular, but the reasons for this success remain unclear because of the inherent complexity of deep learning. This paper provides empirical evidence of its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-02-07 Shuntaro Takahashi , Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii

Zipf's law is just one out of many universal laws proposed to describe statistical regularities in language. Here we review and critically discuss how these laws can be statistically interpreted, fitted, and tested (falsified). The modern…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-05-27 Eduardo G. Altmann , Martin Gerlach

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

Zipf's law is the main regularity of quantitative linguistics. Despite of many works devoted to foundations of this law, it is still unclear whether it is only a statistical regularity, or it has deeper relations with information-carrying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Weibing Deng , Armen E. Allahverdyan

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 law states that sequential frequencies of words in a text correspond to a power function. Its probabilistic model is an infinite urn scheme with asymptotically power distribution. The exponent of this distribution must be estimated.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-06-15 Mikhail Chebunin , Artyom Kovalevskii

The joint probability distribution of many degrees of freedom in biological systems, such as firing patterns in neural networks or antibody sequence composition in zebrafish, often follow Zipf's law, where a power law is observed on a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-08-13 David J. Schwab , Ilya Nemenman , Pankaj Mehta

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…

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

Quantitative linguistics has provided us with a number of empirical laws that characterise the evolution of languages and competition amongst them. In terms of language usage, one of the most influential results is Zipf's law of word…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-01-21 Alvaro Corral , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Gemma Boleda , Albert Diaz-Guilera , .

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

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

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