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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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Bernardino Casas , Antoni Hernández-Fernández , Neus Català , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Jaume Baixeries

It turns out that some empirical facts in Big Data are the effects of properties of large numbers. Zipf's law 'noise' is an example of such an artefact. We expose several properties of the power law distributions and of similar distribution…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-05-09 Horia-Nicolai L. Teodorescu

Zipf's law is a paradigm describing the importance of different elements in communication systems, especially in linguistics. Despite the complexity of the hierarchical structure of language, music has in some sense an even more complex…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-11-20 Marc Serra-Peralta , Joan Serrà , Álvaro Corral

OpenAI's GPT-4 is a Large Language Model (LLM) that can generate coherent constructed languages, or "conlangs," which we propose be called "genlangs" when generated by Artificial Intelligence (AI). The genlangs created by ChatGPT for this…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-25 Justin Diamond

The frequency distributions of DNA k-mers are shaped by fundamental biological processes and offer a window into genome structure and evolution. Inspired by analogies to natural language, prior studies have attempted to model genomic k-mer…

Zipf's law of abbreviation, namely the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter, has been viewed as a manifestation of compression, i.e. the minimization of the length of forms -- a universal principle of natural communication.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-31 Sonia Petrini , Antoni Casas-i-Muñoz , Jordi Cluet-i-Martinell , Mengxue Wang , Christian Bentz , Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

It is traditionally assumed that Zipf's law implies the power-law growth of the number of different elements with the total number of elements in a system - the so-called Heaps' law. We show that a careful definition of Zipf's law leads to…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-06-17 Francesc Font-Clos , Alvaro Corral

Zipf's law describes the empirical size distribution of the components of many systems in natural and social sciences and humanities. We show, by solving a statistical model, that Zipf's law co-occurs with the maximization of the diversity…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2021-10-05 Onofrio Mazzarisi , Amanda de Azevedo-Lopes , Jeferson J. Arenzon , Federico Corberi

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

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-11-05 Martin Gerlach , Eduardo G. Altmann

Apparently random events in nature often reveal hidden patterns when analysed using diverse and robust statistical tools. Power-law distributions, for example, project diverse natural phenomenon, ranging from earthquakes1 to heartbeat…

Natural language is inherently a discrete symbolic representation of human knowledge. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) and in natural language processing (NLP) seem to contradict the above intuition: discrete symbols are fading…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-03-02 Lorenzo Ferrone , Fabio Massimo Zanzotto

This article investigates scaling laws within language families using data from over six thousand languages and analyzing emergent patterns observed in Zipf-like classification graphs. Both macroscopic (based on number of languages by…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-02-02 Maelyson R. F. Santos , Marcelo A. F. Gomes

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…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-11-09 Juan C Quiroz , Liliana Laranjo , Catalin Tufanaru , Ahmet Baki Kocaballi , Dana Rezazadegan , Shlomo Berkovsky , Enrico Coiera

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…

Methodology · Statistics 2025-12-16 Vladimir Berman

Despite renewed interest in emergent language simulations with neural networks, little is known about the basic properties of the induced code, and how they compare to human language. One fundamental characteristic of the latter, known as…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2019-10-16 Rahma Chaabouni , Eugene Kharitonov , Emmanuel Dupoux , Marco Baroni

We explore a probabilistic model of an artistic text: words of the text are chosen independently of each other in accordance with a discrete probability distribution on an infinite dictionary. The words are enumerated 1, 2, $\ldots$, and…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2019-05-02 Mikhail Chebunin , Artyom Kovalevskii

The importance of statistical patterns of language has been debated over decades. Although Zipf's law is perhaps the most popular case, recently, Menzerath's law has begun to be involved. Menzerath's law manifests in language, music and…

Traditional linguistic theories have largely regard language as a formal system composed of rigid rules. However, their failures in processing real language, the recent successes in statistical natural language processing, and the findings…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-02 Shuiyuan Yu , Chunshan Xu , Haitao Liu

The joint probability distribution of many degrees of freedom in biological systems, such as firing patterns in neural networks or antibody sequence composition in zebrafish, often follow Zipf's law, where a power law is observed on a…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-08-13 David J. Schwab , Ilya Nemenman , Pankaj Mehta