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The choice of tokenizer can profoundly impact language model performance, yet accessible and reliable evaluations of tokenizer quality remain an open challenge. Inspired by scaling consistency, we show that smaller models can accurately…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-04 Jonas F. Lotz , António V. Lopes , Stephan Peitz , Hendra Setiawan , Leonardo Emili

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-01-19 Neus Català , Jaume Baixeries , Ramon Ferrer-Cancho , Lluís Padró , Antoni Hernández-Fernández

The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf's law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the power law exponent converges strongly to $-1$ as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-04-20 Richard Perline , Ronald Perline

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-03-05 Jake Ryland Williams , Paul R. Lessard , Suma Desu , Eric Clark , James P. Bagrow , Christopher M. Danforth , Peter Sheridan Dodds

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

The binary many-step Markov chain with the step-like memory function is considered as a model for the analysis of rank distributions of words in stochastic symbolic dynamical systems. We prove that the envelope curve for this distribution…

History and Philosophy of Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 K. E. Kechedzhy O. V. Usatenko , V. A. Yampol'skii

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

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…

Cryptography and Security · Computer Science 2015-09-02 David Malone , Kevin Maher

The Zipf's law establishes that if the words of a (large) text are ordered by decreasing frequency, the frequency versus the rank decreases as a power law with exponent close to $-1$. Previous work has stressed that this pattern arises from…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-04-03 Felipe Urbina , Javier Vera

The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-01-16 Michael Ramscar

Semantic communication aims to convey meaning rather than bit-perfect reproduction, representing a paradigm shift from traditional communication. This paper investigates distribution learning in semantic communication where receivers must…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-08-15 Samer Lahoud , Kinda Khawam

We use the formulation of equilibrium statistical mechanics in order to study some important characteristics of language. Using a simple expression for the Hamiltonian of a language system, which is directly implied by the Zipf law, we are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-11 Kosmas Kosmidis , Alkiviadis Kalampokis , Panos Argyrakis

Distributional semantics is the linguistic theory that a word's meaning can be derived from its distribution in natural language (i.e., its use). Language models are commonly viewed as an implementation of distributional semantics, as they…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-21 Zhang Enyan , Zewei Wang , Michael A. Lepori , Ellie Pavlick , Helena Aparicio

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

Many studies were recently done for investigating the properties of contextual language models but surprisingly, only a few of them consider the properties of these models in terms of semantic similarity. In this article, we first focus on…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-11-25 Olivier Ferret

Zipf's law states that sequential frequencies of words in a text correspond to a power function. Its probabilistic model is an infinite urn scheme with asymptotically power distribution. The exponent of this distribution must be estimated.…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2017-06-15 Mikhail Chebunin , Artyom Kovalevskii

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…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2016-07-06 Laurence Aitchison , Nicola Corradi , Peter E. Latham

We inspect the deductive connection between the neural scaling law and Zipf's law -- two statements discussed in machine learning and quantitative linguistics. The neural scaling law describes how the cross entropy rate of a foundation…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2025-12-23 Łukasz Dębowski

The performance of deep learning in natural language processing has been spectacular, but the reasons for this success remain unclear because of the inherent complexity of deep learning. This paper provides empirical evidence of its…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-02-07 Shuntaro Takahashi , Kumiko Tanaka-Ishii

Recent works have highlighted optimization difficulties faced by gradient descent in training the first and last layers of transformer-based language models, which are overcome by optimizers such as Adam. These works suggest that the…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-05-27 Frederik Kunstner , Francis Bach