TY - JOUR
T1 - The meta book and size-dependent properties of written language
AU - Bernhardsson, Sebastian
AU - Correa da Rocha, Luis Enrique
AU - Minnhagen, Petter
PY - 2009/12/10
Y1 - 2009/12/10
N2 - 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.
AB - 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.
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=72049122956&partnerID=8YFLogxK
U2 - 10.1088/1367-2630/11/12/123015
DO - 10.1088/1367-2630/11/12/123015
M3 - Article
AN - SCOPUS:72049122956
SN - 1367-2630
VL - 11
JO - New Journal of Physics
JF - New Journal of Physics
M1 - 123015
ER -