You are here: Home :: Area CULI :: Linguistics and literature

Montemurro, Marcelo A., Zanette, D.

Frequency-rank distribution of words in large text samples: phenomenology and models

In this paper we revisit Zipf's law in the context of linguistics. The deviations from the original simple power law are analysed and a dynamic model for text generation is proposed whose parameters can be associated with some structural features of languages. Furthermore, for the case of large corpora a novel phenomenology is disclosed. In this case a quantitative description of all the scaling regimes is possible by considering the family of solutions of a single first order differential equation.

Glottometrics, RAM-Verlag

Volume: 4, 09/2002
Pages: 87-99

Show full article (external site)

Show all available items of this journal

 

Area CULI