Related papers: Proper Interpretation of Heaps' and Zipf's Laws
The task of text segmentation may be undertaken at many levels in text analysis---paragraphs, sentences, words, or even letters. Here, we focus on a relatively fine scale of segmentation, hypothesizing it to be in accord with a stochastic…
In this paper we combine statistical analysis of large text databases and simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the statistics of word frequencies. Besides the sublinear scaling of the vocabulary size with…
We present a simple structure based model of how words are formed from morphemes. The model explains two major empirical facts: the typical distribution of word lengths and the appearance of Zipf like rank frequency curves. In contrast to…
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…
Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…
A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more than a decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies. The family is a based on a combination of two information theoretic principles:…
A new angle of view is proposed to find the simple rules dominating complex systems and regular patterns behind random phenomena such as cities. Hierarchy of cities reflects the ubiquitous structure frequently observed in the natural world…
Zipf's law is shown to arise as the variational solution of a problem formulated in Fisher's terms. An appropriate minimization process involving Fisher information and scale-invariance yields this universal rank distribution. As an example…
We analyse correspondence of a text to a simple probabilistic model. The model assumes that the words are selected independently from an infinite dictionary. The probability distribution correspond to the Zipf---Mandelbrot law. We count…
Zipf's law, and power laws in general, have attracted and continue to attract considerable attention in a wide variety of disciplines - from astronomy to demographics to software structure to economics to linguistics to zoology, and even…
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,…
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…
We report about universality of rank-integration distributions of open spaces in city space syntax similar to the famous rank-size distributions of cities (Zipf's law). We also demonstrate that the degree of choice an open space represents…
Zipf's power-law distribution is a generic empirical statistical regularity found in many complex systems. However, rather than universality with a single power-law exponent (equal to 1 for Zipf's law), there are many reported deviations…
In this article, I conduct a textual and contextual analysis of the empirical literature on Zipf's law for cities. Building on previous meta-analysis material openly available, I collect full texts and bibliographies of 66 scientific…
Evidence is given for a systematic text-length dependence of the power-law index gamma of a single book. The estimated gamma values are consistent with a monotonic decrease from 2 to 1 with increasing length of a text. A direct connection…
Why does Zipf's law give a good description of data from seemingly completely unrelated phenomena? Here it is argued that the reason is that they can all be described as outcomes of a ubiquitous random group division: the elements can be…
A "monkey book" is a book consisting of a random distribution of letters and blanks, where a group of letters surrounded by two blanks is defined as a word. We compare the statistics of the word distribution for a monkey book with the…
In this paper we quantify the consistency of word usage in written texts represented by complex networks, where words were taken as nodes, by measuring the degree of preservation of the node neighborhood.} Words were considered highly…
A mere hyperbolic law, like the Zipf's law power function, is often inadequate to describe rank-size relationships. An alternative theoretical distribution is proposed based on theoretical physics arguments starting from the Yule-Simon…