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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

Zipf's law has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law. However, there is much dispute whether it is…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-07-06 Shuiyuan Yu , Chunshan Xu , Haitao Liu

A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more than a decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies. The family is a based on a combination of two information theoretic principles:…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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

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

Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes , Erich R. Round

Zipf's law on word frequency is observed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and so on, yet it does not hold for Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. A model for writing process is proposed to explain the above difference, which takes…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-05-03 Linyuan Lu , Zi-Ke Zhang , Tao Zhou

According to Zipf's meaning-frequency law, words that are more frequent tend to have more meanings. Here it is shown that a linear dependency between the frequency of a form and its number of meanings is found in a family of models of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-10-14 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

Zipf's law states that if words of language are ranked in the order of decreasing frequency in texts, the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. It is very robust as an experimental observation, but to date it escaped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2009-01-22 Dmitrii Manin

Zipf's law in its basic incarnation is an empirical probability distribution governing the frequency of usage of words in a language. As Terence Tao recently remarked, it still lacks a convincing and satisfactory mathematical explanation.…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2013-04-30 Yuri I. Manin

Here we sketch a new derivation of Zipf's law for word frequencies based on optimal coding. The structure of the derivation is reminiscent of Mandelbrot's random typing model but it has multiple advantages over random typing: (1) it starts…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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 a fundamental paradigm in the statistics of written and spoken natural language as well as in other communication systems. We raise the question of the elementary units for which Zipf's law should hold in the most natural way,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-07-14 Alvaro Corral , Gemma Boleda , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

We checked that the distribution of words in text should uniform, which gives Heaps' law as natural result, that is, the number of types of words can be expressed as a power law of the number of tokens within text. We developed a…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-04-16 Kim Chol-jun

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 , .

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

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Michael S. Vitevitch

In this study, we investigate whether speech symbols, learned through deep learning, follow Zipf's law, akin to natural language symbols. Zipf's law is an empirical law that delineates the frequency distribution of words, forming…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Shinnosuke Takamichi , Hiroki Maeda , Joonyong Park , Daisuke Saito , Hiroshi Saruwatari

An important body of quantitative linguistics is constituted by a series of statistical laws about language usage. Despite the importance of these linguistic laws, some of them are poorly formulated, and, more importantly, there is no…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-11-09 Alvaro Corral , Isabel Serra

Natural languages are full of rules and exceptions. One of the most famous quantitative rules is Zipf's law which states that the frequency of occurrence of a word is approximately inversely proportional to its rank. Though this `law' of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-05-27 Jake Ryland Williams , James P. Bagrow , Christopher M. Danforth , Peter Sheridan Dodds
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