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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-06 Wentian Li , Oscar Fontanelli

The spatial distribution of people exhibits clustering across a wide range of scales, from household ($\sim 10^{-2}$ km) to continental ($\sim 10^4$ km) scales. Empirical data indicates simple power-law scalings for the size distribution of…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-03-23 Henry W. Lin , Abraham Loeb

Despite renewed interest in emergent language simulations with neural networks, little is known about the basic properties of the induced code, and how they compare to human language. One fundamental characteristic of the latter, known as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Rahma Chaabouni , Eugene Kharitonov , Emmanuel Dupoux , Marco Baroni

Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Richard Futrell , Michael Hahn

Time evolution of the cities and of the languages is considered in terms of multiplicative noise and fragmentation processes; where power law (Pareto-Zipf law) and slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution result for the size…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 C. Tuncay

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

Bayesian modelling and statistical text analysis rely on informed probability priors to encourage good solutions. This paper empirically analyses whether text in medical discharge reports follow Zipf's law, a commonly assumed statistical…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Juan C Quiroz , Liliana Laranjo , Catalin Tufanaru , Ahmet Baki Kocaballi , Dana Rezazadegan , Shlomo Berkovsky , Enrico Coiera

The power law is ubiquitous in natural and social phenomena, and is considered as a universal relationship between the frequency and its rank for diverse social systems. However, a general model is still lacking to interpret why these…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-09-27 Shuiyuan Yu , Junying Liang , Haitao Liu

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

We analyse correspondence of a text to a simple probabilistic model. The model assumes that the words are selected independently from an infinite dictionary. The probability distribution correspond to the Zipf---Mandelbrot law. We count…

We model the generation of words with independent unequal probabilities of occurrence of letters. We prove that the probability $p(r)$ of occurrence of words of rank $r$ has a power asymptotics. As distinct from the paper published earlier…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-05-27 V. V. Bochkarev , E. Yu. Lerner

Conversation is a cornerstone of social connection and is linked to well-being outcomes. Conversations vary widely in type with some portion generating complex, dynamic stories. One approach to studying how conversations unfold in time is…

We report about universality of rank-integration distributions of open spaces in city space syntax similar to the famous rank-size distributions of cities (Zipf's law). We also demonstrate that the degree of choice an open space represents…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 D. Volchenkov , Ph. Blanchard

What statistical properties might support learning abstract grammatical knowledge from linear input? We address this question by examining the statistical distribution of function words. Function words have been argued to aid acquisition…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-21 Xiulin Yang , Heidi Getz , Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox

In this paper we quantify the statistical properties and dynamics of the frequency of hashtag use on Twitter. Hashtags are special words used in social media to attract attention and to organize content. Looking at the collection of all…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-06-04 Hongjia H. Chen , Tristram J. Alexander , Diego F. M. Oliveira , Eduardo G. Altmann

We observe the statistical properties of blogs that are expected to reflect social human interaction. Firstly, we introduce a basic normalization preprocess that enables us to evaluate the genuine word frequency in blogs that are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2010-04-09 Yukie Sano , Misako Takayasu

Two fundamental issues surrounding research on Zipf's law regarding city sizes are whether and why this law holds. This paper does not deal with the latter issue with respect to why, and instead investigates whether Zipf's law holds in a…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2020-11-09 Bin Jiang , Junjun Yin , Qingling Liu

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

The dependence of the frequency distributions due to multiple meanings of words in a text is investigated by deleting letters. By coding the words with fewer letters the number of meanings per coded word increases. This increase is measured…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-10-04 Xiaoyong Yan , Petter Minnhagen

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