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

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Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-18 Bertram Højer

Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and…

Adaptation and Self-Organizing Systems · Physics 2015-05-19 Bernat Corominas-Murtra , Jordi Fortuny , Ricard V. Solé

A family of information theoretic models of communication was introduced more than a decade ago to explain the origins of Zipf's law for word frequencies. The family is a based on a combination of two information theoretic principles:…

Physics and Society · Physics 2020-09-24 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho

This papers develops a logical language for representing probabilistic causal laws. Our interest in such a language is twofold. First, it can be motivated as a fundamental study of the representation of causal knowledge. Causality has an…

Artificial Intelligence · Computer Science 2009-04-13 Joost Vennekens , Marc Denecker , Maurice Bruynooghe

We examine the relationship between two different types of ranked data, frequencies and magnitudes. We consider data that can be sorted out either way, through numbers of occurrences or size of the measures, as it is the case, say, of moon…

Statistical Mechanics · Physics 2017-12-13 Carlos Velarde , Alberto Robledo

Statistical analysis of corpora provides an approach to quantitatively investigate natural languages. This approach has revealed that several power laws consistently emerge across different corpora and languages, suggesting universal…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-16 Kai Nakaishi , Ryo Yoshida , Kohei Kajikawa , Koji Hukushima , Yohei Oseki

Time evolution of the cities and of the languages is considered in terms of multiplicative noise and fragmentation processes; where power law (Pareto-Zipf law) and slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution result for the size…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-13 C. Tuncay

It has been repeatedly proposed to expand the scope for SETI, and one of the suggested alternatives to radio is the biological media. Genomic DNA is already used on Earth to store non-biological information. Though smaller in capacity, but…

Other Quantitative Biology · Quantitative Biology 2017-06-13 Vladimir I. shCherbak , Maxim A. Makukov

Zipf's law is well known in linguistics: the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. This is a special case of a more general power law, a common phenomenon in many kinds of real-world statistical data. Here, it is shown…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-10-28 Wim Hordijk

A code of the natural numbers is a uniquely-decodable binary code of the natural numbers with non-decreasing codeword lengths, which satisfies Kraft's inequality tightly. We define a natural partial order on the set of codes, and show how…

Logic in Computer Science · Computer Science 2015-07-01 Yuval Filmus

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

The review summarizes the main methodological concepts used in studying natural language from the perspective of complexity science and documents their applicability in identifying both universal and system-specific features of language in…

Physics and Society · Physics 2024-01-09 Tomasz Stanisz , Stanisław Drożdż , Jarosław Kwapień

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

Despite the recent successes of deep learning in natural language processing (NLP), there remains widespread usage of and demand for techniques that do not rely on machine learning. The advantage of these techniques is their…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2020-12-04 Adam Hare , Yu Chen , Yinan Liu , Zhenming Liu , Christopher G. Brinton

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

When following a sequence - such as reading a text or tracking a user's activity - one can measure how the "dictionary" of distinct elements (types) grows with the number of observations (tokens). When this growth follows a power law, it is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2026-04-21 Célestin Zimmerlin , Thomas Louail , Manuel Moussallam , Marc Barthelemy

When generating natural language from neural probabilistic models, high probability does not always coincide with high quality: It has often been observed that mode-seeking decoding methods, i.e., those that produce high-probability text…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-04-01 Clara Meister , Gian Wiher , Tiago Pimentel , Ryan Cotterell

Motivation: DNA data is transcribed into single-stranded RNA, which folds into specific molecular structures. In this paper we pose the question to what extent sequence- and structure-information correlate. We view this correlation as…

Combinatorics · Mathematics 2016-08-23 Christopher Barrett , Fenix W. Huang , Christian M. Reidys

Statistical analysis of bacteria genomes texts has been performed on the basis of 20 complete genomes origin from Genebank. It has been revealed that the word ranked distributions are quite well approximated by logarithmic law. Results…

Condensed Matter · Physics 2009-10-31 Olga V. Kirillova

We present results from our quantitative study of statistical and network properties of literary and scientific texts written in two languages: English and Polish. We show that Polish texts are described by the Zipf law with the scaling…

Physics and Society · Physics 2013-12-16 Iwona Grabska-Gradzinska , Andrzej Kulig , Jaroslaw Kwapien , Stanislaw Drozdz