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arXiv · 1008.0938

Emergence of Zipf's Law in the Evolution of Communication

Bernat Corominas-Murtra·Jordi Fortuny·Ricard V. Solé
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Abstract

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.

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Bernat Corominas-Murtra, Jordi Fortuny, Ricard V. Solé. 2010-08-05. Emergence of Zipf's Law in the Evolution of Communication. https://doi.org/10.1103/physreve.83.036115

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