Zipf's law in phonograms and Weibull distribution in ideograms: Comparison of English with Japanese

Terutaka Nabeshima, Yukio Pegio Gunji*

*Corresponding author for this work

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

10 Citations (Scopus)

Abstract

Frequency distribution of word usage in a word sequence generated by capping is estimated in terms of the number of "hits" in retrieval of web-pages, to evaluate structure of semantics proper not to a particular text but to a language. Especially we compare distribution of English sequences with Japanese ones and obtain that, for English and Japanese phonogram, frequency of word usage against rank follows power-law function with exponent 1 and, for Japanese ideogram, it follows stretched exponential (Weibull distribution) function. We also discuss that such a difference can result from difference of phonogram based- (English) and ideogram-based language (Japanese).

Original languageEnglish
Pages (from-to)131-139
Number of pages9
JournalBioSystems
Volume73
Issue number2
DOIs
Publication statusPublished - 2004 Feb
Externally publishedYes

Keywords

  • Ideogram
  • Phonogram
  • Weibull distribution

ASJC Scopus subject areas

  • Statistics and Probability
  • Modelling and Simulation
  • Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology(all)
  • Applied Mathematics

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