2010/08/31 by Bernat Corominas-Murtra, Bernat Corominas‐Murtra, Jordi Fortuny +1 · 50 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Computer Science · Mathematics · Physics and Astronomy · Social Sciences · #Artificial intelligence #Computer science #Epistemology #Formalism (music) #Fractal and DNA sequence analysis #Information theory #Language and cultural evolution #Mathematical economics #Mathematics #Origins and Evolution of Life #Philosophy #Property (philosophy) #Statistics #Theoretical computer science #Zipf's law #cond-mat.stat-mech #cs.IT #math-ph #math.IT #math.MP #nlin.AO #physics.soc-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.83.036115
published in Physical Review E 83(3), 036115 (American Physical Society) · 7 pages, 2 figures
arxiv created 2011/01/13 · openalex publication_date 2011/03/28 · arxiv updated 2015/05/19 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/08/05
Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and hearer in a communication system, we introduce evolution by means of a variational approach to the problem based on Kullback's Minimum Discrimination of Information Principle. Therefore, using a formalism fully embedded in the framework of information theory, we demonstrate that Zipf's law is the only expected outcome of an evolving communicative system under a rigorous definition of the communicative tension described by Zipf.