Beyond word frequency: bursts, lulls, and scaling in the temporal distributions of words.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Zipf's discovery that word frequency distributions obey a power law established parallels between biological and physical processes, and language, laying the groundwork for a complex systems perspective on human communication. More recent research has also identified scaling regularities in the dynamics underlying the successive occurrences of events, suggesting the possibility of similar findings for language as well.

Methodology/principal findings

By considering frequent words in USENET discussion groups and in disparate databases where the language has different levels of formality, here we show that the distributions of distances between successive occurrences of the same word display bursty deviations from a Poisson process and are well characterized by a str

SUBMITTER: Altmann EG 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC2770836 | biostudies-literature | 2009 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature