Two regimes in the frequency of words and the origin of complex lexicons: Zipf's law revisited

Zipf's law states that the frequency of a word is a power function of its rank. The exponent of the power is usually accepted to be close to (-)1. Great deviations between the predicted and real number of different words of a text, disagreements between the predicted and real exponent of the pr...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores: Ferrer Cancho, Ramon|||0000-0002-7820-923X, Solé Vicente, Ricard
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2001
País:España
Institución:Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya (UPC)
Repositorio:UPCommons. Portal del coneixement obert de la UPC
Idioma:inglés
OAI Identifier:oai:upcommons.upc.edu:2117/180381
Acceso en línea:https://hdl.handle.net/2117/180381
https://dx.doi.org/10.1076/jqul.8.3.165.4101
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:Computational linguistics
Zipf’s law
Power laws
Word frequency
Complex lexicons
Language evolution
Lingüística computacional
Àrees temàtiques de la UPC::Informàtica::Intel·ligència artificial::Llenguatge natural
Descripción
Sumario:Zipf's law states that the frequency of a word is a power function of its rank. The exponent of the power is usually accepted to be close to (-)1. Great deviations between the predicted and real number of different words of a text, disagreements between the predicted and real exponent of the probability density function and statistics on a big corpus, make evident that word frequency as a function of the rank follows two different exponents, ~(-)1 for the first regime and ~(-)2 for the second. The implications of the change in exponents for the metrics of texts and for the origins of complex lexicons are analyzed.