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Today's probabilistic language generators fall short when it comes to producing coherent and fluent text despite the fact that the underlying models perform well under standard metrics, e.g., perplexity. This discrepancy has puzzled the…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-06-06 Clara Meister , Tiago Pimentel , Gian Wiher , Ryan Cotterell

Present human languages display slightly asymmetric log-normal (Gauss) distribution for size [1-3], whereas present cities follow power law (Pareto-Zipf law)[4]. Our model considers the competition between languages and that between cities…

Computational Physics · Physics 2007-05-23 Caglar Tuncay

The text-length-dependence of real word-frequency distributions can be connected to the general properties of a random book. It is pointed out that this finding has strong implications, when deciding between two conceptually different views…

Physics and Society · Physics 2017-10-03 Xiao-Yong Yan , Petter Minnhagen

Zipf's power-law distribution is a generic empirical statistical regularity found in many complex systems. However, rather than universality with a single power-law exponent (equal to 1 for Zipf's law), there are many reported deviations…

Physics and Society · Physics 2015-03-18 Ryohei Hisano , Didier Sornette , Takayuki Mizuno

We use the formulation of equilibrium statistical mechanics in order to study some important characteristics of language. Using a simple expression for the Hamiltonian of a language system, which is directly implied by the Zipf law, we are…

Physics and Society · Physics 2009-11-11 Kosmas Kosmidis , Alkiviadis Kalampokis , Panos Argyrakis

Symbolic sequences such as written language and genomic DNA display characteristic frequency distributions and long-range correlations extending over many symbols. In language, this takes the form of Zipf's law for word frequencies together…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-03-04 Marcelo A. Montemurro , Mirko Degli Esposti

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

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

Causal processes can give rise to distinctive distributions in the linguistic variables that they affect. Consequently, a secure understanding of a variable's distribution can hold a key to understanding the forces that have causally shaped…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-01-01 Jayden L. Macklin-Cordes , Erich R. Round

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 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

Long-range correlations are found in symbolic sequences from human language, music and DNA. Determining the span of correlations in dolphin whistle sequences is crucial for shedding light on their communicative complexity. Dolphin whistles…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2014-12-03 Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho , Brenda McCowan

In this article, I conduct a textual and contextual analysis of the empirical literature on Zipf's law for cities. Building on previous meta-analysis material openly available, I collect full texts and bibliographies of 66 scientific…

Physics and Society · Physics 2022-02-01 Clémentine Cottineau

Understanding the innovation process, that is the underlying mechanisms through which novelties emerge, diffuse and trigger further novelties is undoubtedly of fundamental importance in many areas (biology, linguistics, social science and…

Physics and Society · Physics 2021-10-29 Giacomo Aletti , Irene Crimaldi

Stochastic equations constitute a major ingredient in many branches of science, from physics to biology and engineering. Not surprisingly, they appear in many quantitative studies of complex systems. In particular, this type of equation is…

Physics and Society · Physics 2023-08-02 Marc Barthelemy

Using data from gene expression databases on various organisms and tissues, including yeast, nematodes, human normal and cancer tissues, and embryonic stem cells, we found that the abundances of expressed genes exhibit a power-law…

Biological Physics · Physics 2009-11-07 Chikara Furusawa , Kunihiko Kaneko

Scaling properties of language are a useful tool for understanding generative processes in texts. We investigate the scaling relations in citywise Twitter corpora coming from the Metropolitan and Micropolitan Statistical Areas of the United…

Physics and Society · Physics 2019-03-12 Eszter Bokányi , Dániel Kondor , Gábor Vattay

We present a theoretical and empirical investigation of the statistical behaviour of the words in a text produced by human language. To this aim, we analyse the word distribution of various texts of Italian language selected from a specific…

Neurons and Cognition · Quantitative Biology 2025-04-15 Diederik Aerts , Jonito Aerts Arguëlles , Lester Beltran , Massimiliano Sassoli de Bianchi , Sandro Sozzo

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

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