Related papers: Zipf's law in 50 languages: its structural pattern…
In this paper we quantify the consistency of word usage in written texts represented by complex networks, where words were taken as nodes, by measuring the degree of preservation of the node neighborhood.} Words were considered highly…
Zipf's law, originally discovered in natural language and later generalized to the Zipf-Mandelbrot law, describes a power-law relationship between the frequency of a Zipfian element and its rank. Due to the semantic characteristics of this…
We study rank-frequency relations for phonemes, the minimal units that still relate to linguistic meaning. We show that these relations can be described by the Dirichlet distribution, a direct analogue of the ideal-gas model in statistical…
Some authors have recently argued that a finite-size scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions cannot be conceptually valid. Here we give solid quantitative evidence for the validity of such scaling law,…
English words and the outputs of many other natural processes are well-known to follow a Zipf distribution. Yet this thoroughly-established property has never been shown to help compress or predict these important processes. We show that…
In this work we analyze statistical properties of 91 relatively small texts in 7 different languages (Spanish, English, French, German, Turkish, Russian, Icelandic) as well as texts with randomly inserted spaces. Despite the size (around…
Statistical studies of languages have focused on the rank-frequency distribution of words. Instead, we introduce here a measure of how word ranks change in time and call this distribution \emph{rank diversity}. We calculate this diversity…
We present results from our quantitative study of statistical and network properties of literary and scientific texts written in two languages: English and Polish. We show that Polish texts are described by the Zipf law with the scaling…
Over the past two centuries, the frequency of word usage in major Western languages has exhibited small amplitude regular cycles, superimposed on larger background trends. We show that these cycles of word usage organize into semantically…
A plethora of natural and socio-economic phenomena share a striking statistical regularity, that is the magnitude of elements decreases with a power law as a function of their position in a ranking of magnitude. Such regularity is known as…
We study the relationship between vocabulary size and text length in a corpus of $75$ literary works in English, authored by six writers, distinguishing between the contributions of three grammatical classes (or ``tags,'' namely, {\it…
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…
As is the case of many signals produced by complex systems, language presents a statistical structure that is balanced between order and disorder. Here we review and extend recent results from quantitative characterisations of the degree of…
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…
Power law distributions characterise several natural and social phenomena. The Zipf law for cities is one of those. The study views the question of whether that global regularity is independent of different spatial distributions of cities.…
Zipf's law for cities is probably the most famous regularity in social sciences. So much that, a hundred years of publication later, its status is not clear: is it a law of social organisation? Is it an instrument of description of city…
Speech is a distinctive complex feature of human capabilities. In order to understand the physics underlying speech production, in this work we empirically analyse the statistics of large human speech datasets ranging several languages. We…
From a grammar point of view, the role of punctuation marks in a sentence is formally defined and well understood. In semantic analysis punctuation plays also a crucial role as a method of avoiding ambiguity of the meaning. A different…
This papers develops a logical language for representing probabilistic causal laws. Our interest in such a language is twofold. First, it can be motivated as a fundamental study of the representation of causal knowledge. Causality has an…
The availability of large datasets requires an improved view on statistical laws in complex systems, such as Zipf's law of word frequencies, the Gutenberg-Richter law of earthquake magnitudes, or scale-free degree distribution in networks.…