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Related papers: Do learned speech symbols follow Zipf's law?

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Tokenization is a fundamental step in natural language processing (NLP) and other sequence modeling domains, where the choice of vocabulary size significantly impacts model performance. Despite its importance, selecting an optimal…

Machine Learning · Computer Science 2025-07-31 Yanjin He , Qingkai Zeng , Meng Jiang

Zipf's law is the main regularity of quantitative linguistics. Despite of many works devoted to foundations of this law, it is still unclear whether it is only a statistical regularity, or it has deeper relations with information-carrying…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-09-25 Weibing Deng , Armen E. Allahverdyan

We checked that the distribution of words in text should uniform, which gives Heaps' law as natural result, that is, the number of types of words can be expressed as a power law of the number of tokens within text. We developed a…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-04-16 Kim Chol-jun

According to Zipf's meaning-frequency law, words that are more frequent tend to have more meanings. Here it is shown that a linear dependency between the frequency of a form and its number of meanings is found in a family of models of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-10-14 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-13 Sonia Petrini , Antoni Casas-i-Muñoz , Jordi Cluet-i-Martinell , Mengxue Wang , Chris Bentz , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-01-08 Ruokuang Lin , Qianli D. Y. Ma , Chunhua Bian

Human language, the most powerful communication system in history, is closely associated with cognition. Written text is one of the fundamental manifestations of language, and the study of its universal regularities can give clues about how…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2009-02-05 M. Angeles Serrano , Alessandro Flammini , Filippo Menczer

Zipf's law predicts a power-law relationship between word rank and frequency in language communication systems and has been widely reported in a variety of natural language processing applications. However, the emergence of natural language…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-05 Bohdan Khomtchouk , Shyam Sudhakaran

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

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

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-01-21 Alvaro Corral , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Gemma Boleda , Albert Diaz-Guilera , .

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

As a core element of culture, images transform perception into structured representations and undergo evolution similar to natural languages. Given that visual input accounts for 60% of human sensory experience, it is natural to ask whether…

Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition · Computer Science 2026-01-09 Ping-Rui Tsai , Chi-hsiang Wang , Yu-Cheng Liao , Hong-Yue Huang , Tzay-Ming Hong

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

The formation of sentences is a highly structured and history-dependent process. The probability of using a specific word in a sentence strongly depends on the 'history' of word-usage earlier in that sentence. We study a simple…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-05-28 Stefan Thurner , Rudolf Hanel , Bo Liu , Bernat Corominas-Murtra

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 demonstrate that large texts, representing human (English, Russian, Ukrainian) and artificial (C++, Java) languages, display quantitative patterns characterized by the Benford-like and Zipf laws. The frequency of a word following the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-03-13 Evgeny Shulzinger , Irina Legchenkova , Edward Bormashenko

The word embedding space in neural models is skewed, and correcting this can improve task performance. We point out that most approaches for modeling, correcting, and measuring the symmetry of an embedding space implicitly assume that the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-11-04 Sho Yokoi , Han Bao , Hiroto Kurita , Hidetoshi Shimodaira

Physics seeks to uncover the laws of Nature and express them through mathematical equations. Despite the vast diversity of natural phenomena, physical equations exhibit structural regularities that set them apart from arbitrary mathematical…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-05-11 Andrei Constantin , Deaglan Bartlett , Harry Desmond , Pedro G. Ferreira

In Phys. Rev. Letters (73:2, 5 Dec. 94), Mantegna et al. conclude on the basis of Zipf rank frequency data that noncoding DNA sequence regions are more like natural languages than coding regions. We argue on the contrary that an empirical…

cmp-lg · Computer Science 2009-09-25 Partha Niyogi , Robert C. Berwick