English

Dynamics of text generation with realistic Zipf distribution

Statistical Mechanics 2007-05-23 v1

Abstract

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 to the production of long coherent messages in the communication process. It is shown that the multiplicative dynamics of our model leads to rank-frequency distributions in quantitative agreement with empirical data. Our results give support to the linguistic relevance of Zipf's law in human language.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.cond-mat/0212496,
  title  = {Dynamics of text generation with realistic Zipf distribution},
  author = {Damián H. Zanette and Marcelo A. Montemurro},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:cond-mat/0212496},
  year   = {2007}
}

Comments

four pages, two figures

R2 v1 2026-07-22T10:45:01.482Z