Question

Describe in your own words the zipf distribution, h ow it functions, and provide an example of where it can be used.

Answer 1

Zipf's law, which propounds that the occurrence frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its relative rank in occurrences, can be used to model the actual frequencies. Corpora can be directly compared with each other and with the ideal Zipf distribution using entropy of the residuals as a metric.

Zipf's law holds if the number of elements with a given frequency is a random variable with power law distribution. It has been claimed that this representation of Zipf's law is more suitable for statistical testing, and in this way it has been analyzed in more than 30,000 English texts.