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The prevailing maximum likelihood estimators for inferring power law models from rank-frequency data are biased. The source of this bias is an inappropriate likelihood function. The correct likelihood function is derived and shown to be…

Applications · Statistics 2021-07-27 Charlie Pilgrim , Thomas T Hills

Argument Unit Recognition and Classification aims at identifying argument units from text and classifying them as pro or against. One of the design choices that need to be made when developing systems for this task is what the unit of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-09-30 Jonathan Kamp , Lisa Beinborn , Antske Fokkens

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…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2015-05-19 Bernat Corominas-Murtra , Jordi Fortuny , Ricard V. Solé

Long-range correlations are found in symbolic sequences from human language, music and DNA. Determining the span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences is crucial for shedding light on their communicative complexity. Dolphin whistles…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-12-03 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Brenda McCowan

Natural languages exhibit striking regularities in their statistical structure, including notably the emergence of Zipf's and Heaps' laws. Despite this, it remains broadly unclear how these properties relate to the modern tokenisation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 David S. Berman , Alexander G. Stapleton

Zipf's law establishes a scaling behavior for word-frequencies in large text corpora. The appearance of Zipfian properties in human language has been previously explained as an optimization problem for the interests of speakers and hearers.…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-02-24 Javier Vera , Felipe Urbina , Wenceslao Palma

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…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2016-05-05 R. Ferrer-i-Cancho , C. Bentz , C. Seguin

Scaling properties of language are a useful tool for understanding generative processes in texts. We investigate the scaling relations in citywise Twitter corpora coming from the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-03-12 Eszter Bokányi , Dániel Kondor , Gábor Vattay

Zipf's law implies the statistical distributions of hyperbolic type, which can describe the properties of stability and entropy loss in linguistics. We present the information theory from which follows that if the system is described by…

Biological Physics · Physics 2014-03-31 K. Lukierska-Walasek , K. Topolski , K. Trojanowski

Despite recent advances in neural text generation, encoding the rich diversity in human language remains elusive. We argue that the sub-optimal text generation is mainly attributable to the imbalanced token distribution, which particularly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-10-06 Byung-Ju Choi , Jimin Hong , David Keetae Park , Sang Wan Lee

The length of coding sequence series in microbial genomes were regarded as a fluctuating system and characterized by the methods of statistical physics. The distribution and the correlatin properties of 50 genomes including bacteria and…

Genomics · Quantitative Biology 2008-05-29 V. V. Morariu

We show how generalized Gibbs-Shannon entropies can provide new insights on the statistical properties of texts. The universal distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) implies that the generalized entropies, computed at the word level,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-02-15 Eduardo G. Altmann , Laercio Dias , Martin Gerlach

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…

We present some product representations for random variables with the Linnik, Mittag-Leffler and Weibull distributions and establish the relationship between the mixing distributions in these representations. Based on these representations,…

Probability · Mathematics 2016-02-09 V. Yu. Korolev , A. I. Zeifman

Standard evaluations of Large language models (LLMs) focus on task performance, offering limited insight into whether correct behavior reflects appropriate underlying mechanisms and risking confirmation bias. We introduce a simple,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-01 Zoë Prins , Samuele Punzo , Frank Wildenburg , Giovanni Cinà , Sandro Pezzelle

Parallel texts (bitexts) have properties that distinguish them from other kinds of parallel data. First, most words translate to only one other word. Second, bitext correspondence is noisy. This article presents methods for biasing…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2007-05-23 I. Dan Melamed

Generative language models define distributions over sequences of tokens that can represent essentially any combination of data modalities (e.g., any permutation of image tokens from VQ-VAEs, speech tokens from HuBERT, BPE tokens for…

The availability of large datasets requires an improved view on statistical laws in complex systems, such as Zipf's law of word frequencies, the Gutenberg-Richter law of earthquake magnitudes, or scale-free degree distribution in networks.…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2019-04-30 Martin Gerlach , Eduardo G. Altmann

Surprisal theory links human processing effort to the predictability of an upcoming linguistic unit, but empirical work often leaves the notion of a unit underspecified. In practice, experimental stimuli are segmented into linguistically…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-05-01 Samuel Kiegeland , Vésteinn Snæbjarnarson , Tim Vieira , Ryan Cotterell

The task of finding a criterion allowing to distinguish a text from an arbitrary set of words is rather relevant in itself, for instance, in the aspect of development of means for internet-content indexing or separating signals and noise in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2007-10-02 D. V. Lande , A. A. Snarskii