The DOI matches its Crossref record; 7 of the 7 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Random texts exhibit Zipf's-law-like word frequency distribution
Abstract
It is shown that the distribution of word frequencies for randomly generated texts is very similar to Zipf's law observed in natural languages such as English. The facts that the frequency of occurrence of a word is almost an inverse power law function of its rank and the exponent of this inverse power law is very close to 1 are largely due to the transformation from the word's length to its rank, which stretches an exponential function to a power law function.>
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Cites
The Fractal Geometry of Nature
Mandelbrot, B. B., & Wheeler, J. A. (1983) · American Journal of Physics · doi:10.1119/1.13295 · Cited by 21,832
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The Fractal Geometry of Nature
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The Psycho-Biology of Language: An Introduction to Dynamic Philology
Henmon, V. A. C., & Zipf, G. K. (1936) · The Modern Language Journal · doi:10.2307/317734 · Cited by 1,119
Selected Studies of the Principle of Relative Frequency in Language
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Intermittency, self-similarity and 1/f spectrum in dissipative dynamical systems
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(1949) · Max Planck Digital Library
Cited by
Newman (2005) · doi:10.1080/00107510500052444 · Cited by 5,749
A Brief History of Generative Models for Power Law and Lognormal Distributions
Mitzenmacher, M. (2004) · Internet Mathematics · doi:10.1080/15427951.2004.10129088 · Cited by 1,188
The small world of human language
Cancho, R. F. I., & Solé, R. V. (2001) · Proceedings of the Royal Society of London. Series B: Biological Sciences · doi:10.1098/rspb.2001.1800 · Cited by 1,046
Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language
Cancho, R. F. I., & Solé, R. V. (2003) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.0335980100 · Cited by 588
Physical approach to complex systems
Kwapień, J., & Drożdż, S. (2012) · Physics Reports · doi:10.1016/j.physrep.2012.01.007 · Cited by 517
Metadata
- Authors
- Li, W.
- Venue
- IEEE Transactions on Information Theory
- Published
- 1992
- Volume
- 38
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 1842-1845
- ISSN
- 0018-9448 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2170521549
- Cited by
- 490
- References
- 7
- FWCI
- 2.24
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- CoChat. (2026). Citation check: Random texts exhibit Zipf's-law-like word frequency distribution. https://app.cochat.ai/papers/10.1109/18.165464
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- Li, W. (1992). Random texts exhibit Zipf's-law-like word frequency distribution. IEEE Transactions on Information Theory. https://doi.org/10.1109/18.165464
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Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
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