Zipf's law

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Zipf's law

 (zĭpfs)
n.
A pattern of distribution in certain data sets, notably words in a linguistic corpus, by which the frequency of an item is inversely proportional to its ranking by frequency. In such a distribution, frequency declines sharply as rank number increases: a small number of items occur very frequently and a large number of items occur very rarely.

[After its formulator George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), American linguist.]
American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, Fifth Edition. Copyright © 2016 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. Published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company. All rights reserved.
References in periodicals archive
The classical laws are the pillar of bibliometric or scientometric studies: 'Bradford's law of scattering' (1) (scattering of publication); 'Lotka's law of Scientific Productivity' (2) (author's productivity in a subject); and 'Zipf's Law of Word's Occurrence' (3) (ranking of the word's frequency in a literature).
First, we adopt the bibliometric technique in the field of research, based on Zipf's Law, or Principle of Least Effort (Zipf, 1949).
"Power Laws, Pareto Distributions and Zipf's Law," Contemporary Physics 46(5): 323-351.
One is to randomly decide it, which is called random holding, and the other is to decide it according to Zipf's law [11], which is called Zipfs holding.
According to Zipf's law [3], in a list of word forms ordered by the frequency of occurrence, the frequency of the rth word form obeys a power function of r (the value r is called the rank of the word form).
Ferrer I Cancho, "Zipf's law from a communicative phase transition," The European Physical Journal B--Condensed Matter and Complex Systems, vol.
Two correlated scaling laws are often employed to analyze a hierarchy of cities: one is Zipf's law, and the other is the law of allometric growth.
The second approach is the so called rank-size distribution (RSD) and it is also known as the Zipf's law, honorary to George Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950) who applied it on texts to detect patterns and hierarchies between words (Zipf, 1935).
The most fundamental property of languages is the one known as Zipf's law. For any language, if we plot the frequency of words versus their rank for a sufficiently large collection of textual data, we will see a clear trend, which resembles a power law distribution.(ILTRC, 2014) In our experiment the most frequent words and short words (less than three character words) are considered as stop-words and they are removed from the corpus.
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