MIT 2.003SC Engineering Dynamics, Fall 2011 View the complete course: http://ocw.mit.edu/2-003SCF11 Instructor: J. Kim Vandiver License: Creative Commons BY-...
Damián H. Zanette, Marcelo A. Montemurro
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.
E. Burke, S. Gustafson, and G. Kendall. GECCO 2002: Proceedings of the Genetic and
Evolutionary Computation Conference, page 716--723. New York, Morgan Kaufmann Publishers, (9-13 July 2002)
H. Suetani, T. Yanagita, and K. Aihara. Abstract Book of the XXIII IUPAP International Conference on Statistical Physics, Genova, Italy, (9-13 July 2007)
E. Burke, S. Gustafson, G. Kendall, and N. Krasnogor. Parallel Problem Solving from Nature - PPSN VII, 2439, page 341--350. Granada, Spain, Springer-Verlag, (7-11 September 2002)
R. Laubenbacher. Algebraic Biology 2005, Proceedings of the First International Conference on Algebraic Biology - Computer Algebra in Biology, page 33-35. Tokyo, Universal Academy Press, (2005)
D. Schall, and F. Skopik. Proceedings of the 15th international conference on Advances in databases and information systems, page 285--301. Berlin, Heidelberg, Springer-Verlag, (2011)