The meta book and size-dependent properties of written language
- 1. Department of Physics, Umeaa University, 901 87 Umeaa (Sweden)
Description
Evidence is presented for a systematic text-length dependence of the power-law index γ of a single book. The estimated γ values are consistent with a monotonic decrease from 2 to 1 with increasing text length. A direct connection to an extended Heap's law is explored. The infinite book limit is, as a consequence, proposed to be given by γ=1 instead of the value γ=2 expected if Zipf's law is universally applicable. In addition, we explore the idea that the systematic text-length dependence can be described by a meta book concept, which is an abstract representation reflecting the word-frequency structure of a text. According to this concept the word-frequency distribution of a text, with a certain length written by a single author, has the same characteristics as a text of the same length extracted from an imaginary complete infinite corpus written by the same author.
Availability note (English)
Available from http://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1367-2630/11/12/123015Additional details
Identifiers
Publishing Information
- Journal Title
- New Journal of Physics
- Journal Volume
- 11
- Journal Issue
- 12
- Journal Page Range
- [15 p.]
- ISSN
- 1367-2630
INIS
- Country of Publication
- United Kingdom
- Country of Input or Organization
- International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA)
- INIS RN
- 41047720
- Subject category
- S99: GENERAL AND MISCELLANEOUS;
- Descriptors DEI
- AUGMENTATION; DISTRIBUTION; INDEXES; LENGTH
- Descriptors DEC
- DIMENSIONS; DOCUMENT TYPES