Zipf's law
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English
Etymology
From Zipf + law. After George Kingsley Zipf (1902–1950), American linguist. From the observed distribution of a word's frequency of occurrence against its rank of occurrence, discovered in Zipf's research, as a graph of logarithm of frequency against logarithm of ranking resulting in a straight line with −1 slope.
Proper noun
- The fact that many types of data studied in the physical and social sciences can be approximated with a Zipfian distribution.
- 2019, Hobson Lane, Cole Howard, Hannes Max Hapke, Natural Language Processing In Action , Shelter Island: Manning, →ISBN:
- So Zipf’s Law suggests that you scale all your word frequencies (and document frequencies) with the
log()function, the inverse ofexp().