Abstract
We present that, the rank-frequency relation in textual data follows f ∝ r-𝛼(r+𝛾)-𝛽, where f is the token frequency and r is the rank by frequency, with (𝛼, 𝛽, 𝛾) as parameters. The formulation is derived based on the empirical observation that d2 (x+y)/dx2 is a typical impulse function, where (x,y)=(log r, log f). The formulation is the power law when 𝛽=0 and the Zipf–Mandelbrot law when 𝛼=0. We illustrate that 𝛼 is related to the analytic features of syntax and 𝛽+𝛾 to those of morphology in natural languages from an investigation of multilingual corpora.- Anthology ID:
- 2020.acl-main.44
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
- Month:
- July
- Year:
- 2020
- Address:
- Online
- Venue:
- ACL
- SIG:
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 460–464
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.44
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.44
- Cite (ACL):
- Chenchen Ding, Masao Utiyama, and Eiichiro Sumita. 2020. A Three-Parameter Rank-Frequency Relation in Natural Languages. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 460–464, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- A Three-Parameter Rank-Frequency Relation in Natural Languages (Ding et al., ACL 2020)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/2020.acl-main.44.pdf