Meaningfulness and unit of Zipf’s law: evidence from danmu comments

Zhou Yihan


Abstract
Zipf’s law is a succinct yet powerful mathematical law in linguistics. However the mean-ingfulness and units of the law have remained controversial. The current study usesonline video comments call “danmu comment” to investigate these two questions. Theresults are consistent with previous studies arguing Zipf’s law is subject to topical coher-ence. Specifically it is found that danmu comments sampled from a single video followZipf’s law better than danmu comments sampled from a collection of videos. The resultsalso suggest the existence of multiple units of Zipf’s law. When different units includingwords n-grams and danmu comments are compared both words and danmu commentsobey Zipf’s law and words may be a better fit. The issues of combined n-grams in the literature are also discussed.
Anthology ID:
2021.ccl-1.93
Volume:
Proceedings of the 20th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics
Month:
August
Year:
2021
Address:
Huhhot, China
Editors:
Sheng Li (李生), Maosong Sun (孙茂松), Yang Liu (刘洋), Hua Wu (吴华), Kang Liu (刘康), Wanxiang Che (车万翔), Shizhu He (何世柱), Gaoqi Rao (饶高琦)
Venue:
CCL
SIG:
Publisher:
Chinese Information Processing Society of China
Note:
Pages:
1046–1057
Language:
English
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ccl-1.93
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zhou Yihan. 2021. Meaningfulness and unit of Zipf’s law: evidence from danmu comments. In Proceedings of the 20th Chinese National Conference on Computational Linguistics, pages 1046–1057, Huhhot, China. Chinese Information Processing Society of China.
Cite (Informal):
Meaningfulness and unit of Zipf’s law: evidence from danmu comments (Yihan, CCL 2021)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.ccl-1.93.pdf