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Related papers: The Morphemic Origin of Zipf's Law: A Factorized C…

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In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Michael S. Vitevitch

Zipf's law predicts a power-law relationship between word rank and frequency in language communication systems, and is widely reported in texts yet remains enigmatic as to its origins. Computer simulations have shown that language…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-04-04 Bohdan B. Khomtchouk , Claes Wahlestedt

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

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

A morphic word is obtained by iterating a morphism to generate an infinite word, and then applying a coding. We characterize morphic words with polynomial growth in terms of a new type of infinite word called a $\textit{zigzag word}$. A…

Formal Languages and Automata Theory · Computer Science 2023-06-22 Tim Smith

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

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

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

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

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

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 , .

Sentence formation is a highly structured, history-dependent, and sample-space reducing (SSR) process. While the first word in a sentence can be chosen from the entire vocabulary, typically, the freedom of choosing subsequent words gets…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2018-12-31 Rudolf Hanel , Stefan Thurner

We model the generation of words with independent unequal probabilities of occurrence of letters. We prove that the probability $p(r)$ of occurrence of words of rank $r$ has a power asymptotics. As distinct from the paper published earlier…

Statistics Theory · Mathematics 2016-05-27 V. V. Bochkarev , E. Yu. Lerner

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

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…

The inverse relationship between the length of a word and the frequency of its use, first identified by G.K. Zipf in 1935, is a classic empirical law that holds across a wide range of human languages. We demonstrate that length is one…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Stephan C. Meylan , Thomas L. Griffiths

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 on word frequency is observed in English, French, Spanish, Italian, and so on, yet it does not hold for Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters. A model for writing process is proposed to explain the above difference, which takes…

Data Analysis, Statistics and Probability · Physics 2013-05-03 Linyuan Lu , Zi-Ke Zhang , Tao Zhou

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

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