Related papers: Re-evaluating phoneme frequencies
In the last years, researchers have realized the difficulties of fitting power-law distributions properly. These difficulties are higher in Zipf's systems, due to the discreteness of the variables and to the existence of two representations…
What makes some types of languages more probable than others? For instance, we know that almost all spoken languages contain the vowel phoneme /i/; why should that be? The field of linguistic typology seeks to answer these questions and,…
This article discusses the extension of the notion of context from linguistics to the domain of music. In language, the statistical regularity known as Zipf's law -which concerns the frequency of usage of different words- has been…
One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…
Understanding the innovation process, that is the underlying mechanisms through which novelties emerge, diffuse and trigger further novelties is undoubtedly of fundamental importance in many areas (biology, linguistics, social science and…
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…
In a language corpus, the probability that a word occurs $n$ times is often proportional to $1/n^2$. Assigning rank, $s$, to words according to their abundance, $\log s$ vs $\log n$ typically has a slope of minus one. That simple Zipf's law…
Linguistic laws constitute one of the quantitative cornerstones of modern cognitive sciences and have been routinely investigated in written corpora, or in the equivalent transcription of oral corpora. This means that inferences of…
We perform a quantitative analysis of extensive chess databases and show that the frequencies of opening moves are distributed according to a power-law with an exponent that increases linearly with the game depth, whereas the pooled…
Using data from gene expression databases on various organisms and tissues, including yeast, nematodes, human normal and cancer tissues, and embryonic stem cells, we found that the abundances of expressed genes exhibit a power-law…
The Chapter starts with introductory information about quantitative linguistics notions, like rank--frequency dependence, Zipf's law, frequency spectra, etc. Similarities in distributions of words in texts with level occupation in quantum…
The statistical over-representation of phonological features in the basic vocabulary of languages is often interpreted as reflecting potentially universal sound symbolic patterns. However, most of those results have not been tested…
The joint probability distribution of many degrees of freedom in biological systems, such as firing patterns in neural networks or antibody sequence composition in zebrafish, often follow Zipf's law, where a power law is observed on a…
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…
We analyze the occurrence frequencies of over 15 million words recorded in millions of books published during the past two centuries in seven different languages. For all languages and chronological subsets of the data we confirm that two…
It is shown that the distribution of low variability periods in the activity of human heart rate typically follows a multi-scaling Zipf's law. The presence or failure of a power law, as well as the values of the scaling exponents, are…
The power law is useful in describing count phenomena such as network degrees and word frequencies. With a single parameter, it captures the main feature that the frequencies are linear on the log-log scale. Nevertheless, there have been…
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…
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.…
It has been claimed that within a language, morphologically irregular words are more likely to be phonotactically simple and morphologically regular words are more likely to be phonotactically complex. This inverse correlation has been…