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The meaning-frequency law in Zipfian optimization models of communication (1409.7275v2)
Published 25 Sep 2014 in cs.CL, physics.data-an, and physics.soc-ph
Abstract: According to Zipf's meaning-frequency law, words that are more frequent tend to have more meanings. Here it is shown that a linear dependency between the frequency of a form and its number of meanings is found in a family of models of Zipf's law for word frequencies. This is evidence for a weak version of the meaning-frequency law. Interestingly, that weak law (a) is not an inevitable of property of the assumptions of the family and (b) is found at least in the narrow regime where those models exhibit Zipf's law for word frequencies.