Testing Zipf’s meaning-frequency law with wordnets as sense inventories

Francis Bond, Arkadiusz Janz, Marek Maziarz, Ewa Rudnicka


Abstract
According to George K. Zipf, more frequent words have more senses. We have tested this law using corpora and wordnets of English, Spanish, Portuguese, French, Polish, Japanese, Indonesian and Chinese. We have proved that the law works pretty well for all of these languages if we take - as Zipf did - mean values of meaning count and averaged ranks. On the other hand, the law disastrously fails in predicting the number of senses for a single lemma. We have also provided the evidence that slope coefficients of Zipfian log-log linear model may vary from language to language.
Anthology ID:
2019.gwc-1.44
Volume:
Proceedings of the 10th Global Wordnet Conference
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Wroclaw, Poland
Editors:
Piek Vossen, Christiane Fellbaum
Venue:
GWC
SIG:
SIGLEX
Publisher:
Global Wordnet Association
Note:
Pages:
342–352
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2019.gwc-1.44
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Francis Bond, Arkadiusz Janz, Marek Maziarz, and Ewa Rudnicka. 2019. Testing Zipf’s meaning-frequency law with wordnets as sense inventories. In Proceedings of the 10th Global Wordnet Conference, pages 342–352, Wroclaw, Poland. Global Wordnet Association.
Cite (Informal):
Testing Zipf’s meaning-frequency law with wordnets as sense inventories (Bond et al., GWC 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-2023-videos/2019.gwc-1.44.pdf