Related papers: Re-evaluating phoneme frequencies
Zipf's law of abbreviation, the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, is one of the most solid candidates for a linguistic universal, in the sense that it has the potential for being exceptionless or with a number of exceptions…
This article investigates scaling laws within language families using data from over six thousand languages and analyzing emergent patterns observed in Zipf-like classification graphs. Both macroscopic (based on number of languages by…
The word embedding space in neural models is skewed, and correcting this can improve task performance. We point out that most approaches for modeling, correcting, and measuring the symmetry of an embedding space implicitly assume that the…
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…
When the probability of measuring a particular value of some quantity varies inversely as a power of that value, the quantity is said to follow a power law, also known variously as Zipf's law or the Pareto distribution. Power laws appear…
Zipf's law predicts a power-law relationship between word rank and frequency in language communication systems, and is widely reported in texts yet remains enigmatic as to its origins. Computer simulations have shown that language…
Zipf's law, which states that the probability of an observation is inversely proportional to its rank, has been observed in many domains. While there are models that explain Zipf's law in each of them, those explanations are typically…
Human language, the most powerful communication system in history, is closely associated with cognition. Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how…
Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and…
Despite being a paradigm of quantitative linguistics, Zipf's law for words suffers from three main problems: its formulation is ambiguous, its validity has not been tested rigorously from a statistical point of view, and it has not been…
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…
Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…
Complex natural and technological systems can be considered, on a coarse-grained level, as assemblies of elementary components: for example, genomes as sets of genes, or texts as sets of words. On one hand, the joint occurrence of…
In this paper we will look at the distribution with which passwords are chosen. Zipf's Law is commonly observed in lists of chosen words. Using password lists from four different on-line sources, we will investigate if Zipf's law is a good…
The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…
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…
With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…
Zipf's law is the main regularity of quantitative linguistics. Despite of many works devoted to foundations of this law, it is still unclear whether it is only a statistical regularity, or it has deeper relations with information-carrying…
History-dependent processes are ubiquitous in natural and social systems. Many such stochastic processes, especially those that are associated with complex systems, become more constrained as they unfold, meaning that their sample-space, or…
In this second part of our survey on the social and natural distributions, we investigate some models, which intend to explain the statistical regularity of the natural and social distributions. There is a large variety of models and in…