Scientific publications

@article{Catala2021a,

title = {Zipf's laws of meaning in Catalan},

author = {N. Català and J. Baixeries and R. Ferrer-Cancho and L. Padró and A. Hernández-Fernández},

url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2107.00042},

doi = {doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0260849},

year  = {2021},

date = {2021-01-01},

journal = {PLOS ONE},

volume = {16},

number = {12},

pages = {e0260849},

abstract = {In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf formulated a couple of statistical laws on the relationship between the frequency of a word with its number of meanings: the law of meaning distribution, relating the frequency of a word and its frequency rank, and the meaning-frequency law, relating the frequency of a word with its number of meanings. Although these laws were formulated more than half a century ago, they have been only investigated in a few languages. Here we present the first study of these laws in Catalan. We verify these laws in Catalan via the relationship among their exponents and that of the rank-frequency law. We present a new protocol for the analysis of these Zipfian laws that can be extended to other languages. We report the first evidence of two marked regimes for these laws in written language and speech, paralleling the two regimes in Zipf's rank-frequency law in large multi-author corpora discovered in early 2000s. Finally, the implications of these two regimes will be discussed.},

keywords = {Zipf's law for word frequencies, Zipf's meaning-frequency law},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{Casas2019b,

title = {Polysemy and brevity versus frequency in language},

author = {B. Casas and A. Hernández-Fernández and N. Català and R. Ferrer-i-Cancho and J. Baixeries},

doi = {10.1016/j.csl.2019.03.007},

year  = {2019},

date = {2019-01-01},

journal = {Computer Speech and Language},

volume = {58},

pages = {19 – 50},

abstract = {The pioneering research of G. K. Zipf on the relationship between word frequency and other word features led to the formulation of various linguistic laws. The most popular is Zipf’s law for word frequencies. Here we focus on two laws that have been studied less intensively: the meaning-frequency law, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be more polysemous, and the law of abbreviation, i.e. the tendency of more frequent words to be shorter. In a previous work, we tested the robustness of these Zipfian laws for English, roughly measuring word length in number of characters and distinguishing adult from child speech. In the present article, we extend our study to other languages (Dutch and Spanish) and introduce two additional measures of length: syllabic length and phonemic length. Our correlation analysis indicates that both the meaning-frequency law and the law of abbreviation hold overall in all the analyzed languages.},

keywords = {Zipf's law of abbreviation, Zipf's meaning-frequency law},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{Ferrer2017b,

title = {The origins of Zipf's meaning-frequency law},

author = {R. Ferrer-i-Cancho and M. Vitevitch},

doi = {10.1002/jasist.24057},

year  = {2018},

date = {2018-01-01},

journal = {Journal of the American Association for Information Science and Technology},

volume = {69},

number = {11},

pages = {1369–1379},

abstract = {In his pioneering research, G.K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two assumptions: that words follow Zipf's law for word frequencies (a power law dependency between frequency and rank) and Zipf's law of meaning distribution (a power law dependency between number of meanings and rank). Here we show that a single assumption on the joint probability of a word and a meaning suffices to infer Zipf's meaning‐frequency law or relaxed versions. Interestingly, this assumption can be justified as the outcome of a biased random walk in the process of mental exploration.},

keywords = {information theory, network science, Zipf's meaning-frequency law},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}

@article{Ferrer2009f,

title = {A law of word meaning in dolphin whistle types},

author = {R. Ferrer-i-Cancho and B. McCowan},

doi = {10.3390/e11040688},

year  = {2009},

date = {2009-01-01},

journal = {Entropy},

volume = {11},

number = {4},

pages = {688-701},

abstract = {We show that dolphin whistle types tend to be used in specific behavioral contexts, which is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphin whistle have some sort of “meaning”. Besides, in some cases, it can be shown that the behavioral context in which a whistle tends to occur or not occur is shared by different individuals, which is consistent with the hypothesis that dolphins are communicating through whistles. Furthermore, we show that the number of behavioral contexts significantly associated with a certain whistle type tends to grow with the frequency of the whistle type, a pattern that is reminiscent of a law of word meanings stating, as a tendency, that the higher the frequency of a word, the higher its number of meanings. Our findings indicate that the presence of Zipf's law in dolphin whistle types cannot be explained with enough detail by a simplistic die rolling experiment.},

keywords = {Zipf's meaning-frequency law},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {article}

}