@inproceedings{yihan-2021-meaningfulness,
    title = "Meaningfulness and unit of {Z}ipf{'}s law: evidence from danmu comments",
    author = "Yihan, Zhou",
    editor = "Li, Sheng  and
      Sun, Maosong  and
      Liu, Yang  and
      Wu, Hua  and
      Liu, Kang  and
      Che, Wanxiang  and
      He, Shizhu  and
      Rao, Gaoqi",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 20th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics",
    month = aug,
    year = "2021",
    address = "Huhhot, China",
    publisher = "Chinese Information Processing Society of China",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/fix-sig-urls/2021.ccl-1.93/",
    pages = "1046--1057",
    language = "eng",
    abstract = "Zipf{'}s law is a succinct yet powerful mathematical law in linguistics. However the mean-ingfulness and units of the law have remained controversial. The current study usesonline video comments call ``danmu comment'' to investigate these two questions. Theresults are consistent with previous studies arguing Zipf{'}s law is subject to topical coher-ence. Specifically it is found that danmu comments sampled from a single video followZipf{'}s law better than danmu comments sampled from a collection of videos. The resultsalso suggest the existence of multiple units of Zipf{'}s law. When different units includingwords n-grams and danmu comments are compared both words and danmu commentsobey Zipf{'}s law and words may be a better fit. The issues of combined n-grams in the literature are also discussed."
}