English
Related papers

Related papers: Relating Zipf's law to textual information

200 papers

Sentence formation is a highly structured, history-dependent, and sample-space reducing (SSR) process. While the first word in a sentence can be chosen from the entire vocabulary, typically, the freedom of choosing subsequent words gets…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Rudolf Hanel , Stefan Thurner

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

In natural language using short sentences is considered efficient for communication. However, a text composed exclusively of such sentences looks technical and reads boring. A text composed of long ones, on the other hand, demands…

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…

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-02-19 Diego R. Amancio , Osvaldo N. Oliveira , Luciano da F. Costa

The mapping of lexical meanings to wordforms is a major feature of natural languages. While usage pressures might assign short words to frequent meanings (Zipf's law of abbreviation), the need for a productive and open-ended vocabulary,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-05-04 Tiago Pimentel , Irene Nikkarinen , Kyle Mahowald , Ryan Cotterell , Damián Blasi

By determining which were the most common English words and phrases since the beginning of the 16th century, we obtain a unique large-scale view of the evolution of written text. We find that the most common words and phrases in any given…

Physics and Society · Physics 2012-12-10 Matjaz Perc

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

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

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

Statistical methods have been widely employed in recent years to grasp many language properties. The application of such techniques have allowed an improvement of several linguistic applications, which encompasses machine translation,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-02-22 Henrique F. de Arruda , Luciano da F. Costa , Diego R. Amancio

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…

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-10-16 Davide Cugini , André Timpanaro , Giacomo Livan , Giacomo Guarnieri

We discuss the meaning of Zipf's law in nuclear multifragmentation. We remark that Zipf's law is a consequence of a power law fragment size distribution with exponent $\tau \simeq 2$. We also recall why the presence of such distribution is…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2009-11-11 Xavier Campi , Hubert Krivine

Levering data on social media, such as Twitter and Facebook, requires information retrieval algorithms to become able to relate very short text fragments to each other. Traditional text similarity methods such as tf-idf cosine-similarity,…

Information Retrieval · Computer Science 2015-12-03 Cedric De Boom , Steven Van Canneyt , Steven Bohez , Thomas Demeester , Bart Dhoedt

As the most fundamental empirical law, Zipf's law has been studied from many aspects. But its meaning is still an open problem. Some models have been constructed to explain Zipf's law. In the letter, a new concept named nonsymmetric entropy…

Disordered Systems and Neural Networks · Physics 2007-05-23 Chengshi Liu

We review recent progress in understanding the meaning of mutual information in natural language. Let us define words in a text as strings that occur sufficiently often. In a few previous papers, we have shown that a power-law distribution…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2020-03-11 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

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 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