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Large-Scale Analysis of Zipf’s Law in English Texts

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  • Isabel Moreno-Sánchez
  • Francesc Font-Clos
  • Álvaro Corral

Abstract

Despite being a paradigm of quantitative linguistics, Zipf’s law for words suffers from three main problems: its formulation is ambiguous, its validity has not been tested rigorously from a statistical point of view, and it has not been confronted to a representatively large number of texts. So, we can summarize the current support of Zipf’s law in texts as anecdotic. We try to solve these issues by studying three different versions of Zipf’s law and fitting them to all available English texts in the Project Gutenberg database (consisting of more than 30 000 texts). To do so we use state-of-the art tools in fitting and goodness-of-fit tests, carefully tailored to the peculiarities of text statistics. Remarkably, one of the three versions of Zipf’s law, consisting of a pure power-law form in the complementary cumulative distribution function of word frequencies, is able to fit more than 40% of the texts in the database (at the 0.05 significance level), for the whole domain of frequencies (from 1 to the maximum value), and with only one free parameter (the exponent).

Suggested Citation

  • Isabel Moreno-Sánchez & Francesc Font-Clos & Álvaro Corral, 2016. "Large-Scale Analysis of Zipf’s Law in English Texts," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 11(1), pages 1-19, January.
    • Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0147073
    DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0147073
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    References listed on IDEAS

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    1. Martín Haro & Joan Serrà & Perfecto Herrera & Álvaro Corral, 2012. "Zipf's Law in Short-Time Timbral Codings of Speech, Music, and Environmental Sound Signals," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 7(3), pages 1-10, March.
    2. Álvaro Corral & Gemma Boleda & Ramon Ferrer-i-Cancho, 2015. "Zipf’s Law for Word Frequencies: Word Forms versus Lemmas in Long Texts," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 10(7), pages 1-23, July.
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