Related papers: The optimality of word lengths. Theoretical founda…
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…
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…
The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf's law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that…
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…
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…
Languages across the world exhibit Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely more frequent words tend to be shorter. The generalized version of the law - an inverse relationship between the frequency of a unit and its magnitude - holds also for…
The problem of compression in standard information theory consists of assigning codes as short as possible to numbers. Here we consider the problem of optimal coding -- under an arbitrary coding scheme -- and show that it predicts Zipf's…
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,…
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…
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…
It is often stated that human languages, as other biological systems, are shaped by cost-cutting pressures but, to what extent? Attempts to quantify the degree of optimality of languages by means of an optimality score have been scarce and…
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,…
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…
Here we present a new class of optimality for coding systems. Members of that class are displaced linearly from optimal coding and thus exhibit Zipf's law, namely a power-law distribution of frequency ranks. Within that class, Zipf's law,…
We study a deliberately simple, fully non-linguistic model of text: a sequence of independent draws from a finite alphabet of letters plus a single space symbol. A word is defined as a maximal block of non-space symbols. Within this…
Human language, as a typical complex system, its organization and evolution is an attractive topic for both physical and cultural researchers. In this paper, we present the first exhaustive analysis of the text organization of human speech.…
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…
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…
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…
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…