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Related papers: A Note on Zipf's Law, Natural Languages, and Nonco…

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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

The article discusses the frequency of characters of Oracle,concluding that the frequency and the rank of a word or character is fit to Zipf-Mandelboit Law or Zipf's law with three parameters,and figuring out the parameters based on the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2014-12-10 Xiuli Wang

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

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

In the near future, all the human genes will be identified. But understanding the functions coded in the genes is a much harder problem. For example, by using block entropy, one has that the DNA code is closer to a random code then written…

Numerical Analysis · Mathematics 2007-07-13 Torbjörn Lundh

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

For a prime $p$ and a positive integer $m$, let $\mathbb{F}_{p^m}$ be the finite field of characteristic $p$, and $\mathfrak{R}_l:=\mathbb{F}_{p^m}[v]/\langle v^l-v\rangle$ be a non-chain ring. In this paper, we study the…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2023-12-14 Ashutosh Singh , Priyanka Sharma , Om Prakash

The problem of differentiating the informational content of coding (exons) and non-coding (introns) regions of a DNA sequence is one of the central problems of genomics. The introns are estimated to be nearly 95% of the DNA and since they…

Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science · Computer Science 2010-10-21 Riyazuddin Mohammed

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

Tandem duplication is the process of inserting a copy of a segment of DNA adjacent to the original position. Motivated by applications that store data in living organisms, Jain et al. (2017) proposed the study of codes that correct tandem…

Information Theory · Computer Science 2018-01-09 Yeow Meng Chee , Johan Chrisnata , Han Mao Kiah , Tuan Thanh Nguyen

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

The prevailing maximum likelihood estimators for inferring power law models from rank-frequency data are biased. The source of this bias is an inappropriate likelihood function. The correct likelihood function is derived and shown to be…

Applications · Statistics 2021-07-27 Charlie Pilgrim , Thomas T Hills

We investigate the origin of Zipf's law for words in written texts by means of a stochastic dynamical model for text generation. The model incorporates both features related to the general structure of languages and memory effects inherent…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2007-05-23 Damián H. Zanette , Marcelo A. Montemurro

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

We show how generalized Gibbs-Shannon entropies can provide new insights on the statistical properties of texts. The universal distribution of word frequencies (Zipf's law) implies that the generalized entropies, computed at the word level,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-02-15 Eduardo G. Altmann , Laercio Dias , Martin Gerlach

Zipf's law is a hallmark of several complex systems with a modular structure, such as books composed by words or genomes composed by genes. In these component systems, Zipf's law describes the empirical power law distribution of component…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2018-12-05 Andrea Mazzolini , Alberto Colliva , Michele Caselle , Matteo Osella

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

Natural languages exhibit striking regularities in their statistical structure, including notably the emergence of Zipf's and Heaps' laws. Despite this, it remains broadly unclear how these properties relate to the modern tokenisation…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-01-08 David S. Berman , Alexander G. Stapleton

We model certain features of human language complexity by means of advanced concepts borrowed from statistical mechanics. Using a time series approach, the diffusion entropy method (DE), we compute the complexity of an Italian corpus of…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2016-11-23 Paolo Allegrini , Paolo Grigolini , Luigi Palatella

A plethora of natural and socio-economic phenomena share a striking statistical regularity, that is the magnitude of elements decreases with a power law as a function of their position in a ranking of magnitude. Such regularity is known as…

Physics and Society · Physics 2025-10-16 Davide Cugini , André Timpanaro , Giacomo Livan , Giacomo Guarnieri