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The empirical studies of city-size distribution show that Zipf's law and the hierarchical scaling law are linked in many ways. The rank-size scaling and hierarchical scaling seem to be two different sides of the same coin, but their…

Physics and Society · Physics 2018-12-21 Yanguang Chen

We show that the Zipf's law for Chinese characters perfectly holds for sufficiently short texts (few thousand different characters). The scenario of its validity is similar to the Zipf's law for words in short English texts. For long…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2014-03-10 W. B. Deng , A. E. Allahverdyan , B. Li , Q. A. Wang

The distribution of frequency counts of distinct words by length in a language's vocabulary will be analyzed using two methods. The first, will look at the empirical distributions of several languages and derive a distribution that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2012-07-17 Reginald D. Smith

What processes can explain how very large populations are able to converge on the use of a particular word or grammatical construction without global coordination? Answering this question helps to understand why new language constructs…

Physics and Society · Physics 2007-05-23 A. Baronchelli , M. Felici , E. Caglioti , V. Loreto , L. Steels

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-04-21 Célestin Zimmerlin , Thomas Louail , Manuel Moussallam , Marc Barthelemy

In this article, we investigate the properties of phoneme N-grams across half of the world's languages. We investigate if the sizes of three different N-gram distributions of the world's language families obey a power law. Further, the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2014-01-07 Taraka Rama , Lars Borin

n-tuple power law widely exists in language, computer program code, DNA and music. After a vast amount of Zipf analyses of n-tuple power law from empirical data, we propose a model to explain the n-tuple power law feature existed in these…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2009-08-05 Xiaocong Gan , Dahui Wang , Zhangang Han

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

The time variation of the rank $k$ of words for six Indo-European languages is obtained using data from Google Books. For low ranks the distinct languages behave differently, maybe due to syntaxis rules, whereas for $k>50$ the law of large…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-02-04 Germinal Cocho , R. F. Rodríguez , Sergio Sánchez , Jorge Flores , Carlos Pineda , Carlos Gershenson

Slovenia's Current Research Information System (SICRIS) currently hosts 86,443 publications with citation data from 8,359 researchers working on the whole plethora of social and natural sciences from 1970 till present. Using these data, we…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2010-06-08 Matjaz Perc

The word-frequency distribution of a text written by an author is well accounted for by a maximum entropy distribution, the RGF (random group formation)-prediction. The RGF-distribution is completely determined by the a priori values of the…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-10-03 Xiao-Yong Yan , Petter Minnhagen

We examine the relationship between two different types of ranked data, frequencies and magnitudes. We consider data that can be sorted out either way, through numbers of occurrences or size of the measures, as it is the case, say, of moon…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-12-13 Carlos Velarde , Alberto Robledo

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

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

The cognitive constraints that humans exhibit in their social interactions have been extensively studied by anthropologists, who have highlighted their regularities across different types of social networks. We postulate that similar…

Social and Information Networks · Computer Science 2021-10-13 Kilian Ollivier , Chiara Boldrini , Andrea Passarella , Marco Conti

A key aim in biology and psychology is to identify fundamental principles underpinning the behavior of animals, including humans. Analyses of human language and the behavior of a range of non-human animal species have provided evidence for…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-12-03 R. Ferrer-i-Cancho , A. Hernández-Fernández , D. Lusseau , G. Agoramoorthy , M. J. Hsu , S. Semple

The importance of statistical patterns of language has been debated over decades. Although Zipf's law is perhaps the most popular case, recently, Menzerath's law has begun to be involved. Menzerath's law manifests in language, music and…

Languages employ different strategies to transmit structural and grammatical information. While, for example, grammatical dependency relationships in sentences are mainly conveyed by the ordering of the words for languages like Mandarin…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-11-01 Alexander Koplenig , Peter Meyer , Sascha Wolfer , Carolin Mueller-Spitzer

Power-law distributions with various exponents are studied. We first introduce a simple and generic model that reproduces Zipf's law. We can regard this model both as the time evolution of the population of cities and that of the asset…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Kenji Kawamura , Naomichi Hatano

The time evolution of Earth with her cities, languages and countries is considered in terms of the multiplicative noise and the fragmentation- processes, where the related families, size distributions, lifetimes, bilinguals, etc. are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 Caglar Tuncay