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

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Morphologically rich languages accentuate two properties of distributional vector space models: 1) the difficulty of inducing accurate representations for low-frequency word forms; and 2) insensitivity to distinct lexical relations that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2017-06-02 Ivan Vulić , Nikola Mrkšić , Roi Reichart , Diarmuid Ó Séaghdha , Steve Young , Anna Korhonen

This thesis investigates how the sub-structure of words can be accounted for in probabilistic models of language. Such models play an important role in natural language processing tasks such as translation or speech recognition, but often…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2015-08-19 Jan A. Botha

In this study, we investigate whether speech symbols, learned through deep learning, follow Zipf's law, akin to natural language symbols. Zipf's law is an empirical law that delineates the frequency distribution of words, forming…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-09-19 Shinnosuke Takamichi , Hiroki Maeda , Joonyong Park , Daisuke Saito , Hiroshi Saruwatari

The dependence with text length of the statistical properties of word occurrences has long been considered a severe limitation quantitative linguistics. We propose a simple scaling form for the distribution of absolute word frequencies…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-06-15 Francesc Font-Clos , Gemma Boleda , Álvaro Corral

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

Word embeddings allow natural language processing systems to share statistical information across related words. These embeddings are typically based on distributional statistics, making it difficult for them to generalize to rare or unseen…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2016-09-27 Parminder Bhatia , Robert Guthrie , Jacob Eisenstein

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

In a language corpus, the probability that a word occurs $n$ times is often proportional to $1/n^2$. Assigning rank, $s$, to words according to their abundance, $\log s$ vs $\log n$ typically has a slope of minus one. That simple Zipf's law…

Populations and Evolution · Quantitative Biology 2019-03-27 Steven A. Frank

One of the ultimate goals for linguists is to find universal properties in human languages. Although words are generally considered as representing arbitrary mapping between linguistic forms and meanings, we propose a new universal law that…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-05-06 Li-Min Wang , Sun-Ting Tsai , Shan-Jyun Wu , Meng-Xue Tsai , Daw-Wei Wang , Yi-Ching Su , Tzay-Ming Hong

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

Human language has a distinct systematic structure, where utterances break into individually meaningful words which are combined to form phrases. We show that natural-language-like systematicity arises in codes that are constrained by a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-19 Richard Futrell , Michael Hahn

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

We have translated fractional Brownian motion (FBM) signals into a text based on two ''letters'', as if the signal fluctuations correspond to a constant stepsize random walk. We have applied the Zipf method to extract the $\zeta '$ exponent…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-11-07 Ph. Bronlet , M. Ausloos

Background: Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2009-11-11 Eduardo G. Altmann , Janet B. Pierrehumbert , Adilson E. Motter

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

Transformer-based language models are effective but complex, and understanding their inner workings and reasoning mechanisms is a significant challenge. Previous research has primarily explored how these models handle simple tasks like name…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-20 Zeyuan Allen-Zhu , Yuanzhi Li

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…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-03-19 Seung Ki Baek , Sebastian Bernhardsson , Petter Minnhagen

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

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

Zipf's law is just one out of many universal laws proposed to describe statistical regularities in language. Here we review and critically discuss how these laws can be statistically interpreted, fitted, and tested (falsified). The modern…

Physics and Society · Physics 2016-05-27 Eduardo G. Altmann , Martin Gerlach