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Applications and explanations of Zipf's law

Author:

David M. W. PowersAuthors Info & Claims

NeMLaP3/CoNLL '98: Proceedings of the Joint Conferences on New Methods in Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

Pages 151 - 160

Published: 11 January 1998 Publication History

Abstract

Recently I have been intrigued by the reappearance of an old friend, George Kingsley Zipf, in a number of not entirely expected places. The law named for him is ubiquitous, but Zipf did not actually discover the law so much as provide a plausible explanation. Others have proposed modifications to Zipf's Law, and closer examination uncovers systematic deviations from its normative form. We demonstrate how Zipf's analysis can be extended to include some of these phenomena.

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NeMLaP3/CoNLL '98: Proceedings of the Joint Conferences on New Methods in Language Processing and Computational Natural Language Learning

January 1998

332 pages

ISBN:0725806346

Conference Chair:
David M. W. Powers
Flinders Uni, Australia

Publisher

Association for Computational Linguistics

United States

Publication History

Published: 11 January 1998

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