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The empirical structure of word frequency distributions
[article]
2020
arXiv
pre-print
The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication, however this claim is necessarily post hoc, and it has been suggested that Zipf's law may in fact describe mixtures of other distributions. From this perspective, recent findings that Sinosphere first (family) names are geometrically distributed are notable,
arXiv:2001.05292v1
fatcat:me5amymdcnflldrpv5q63n4vvq