created 2025-05-26, & modified, =this.modified
Thought
Reviewing, fleshing these out.
- Zipf’s law – frequency of words is inversely proportional to their rank in frequency lists.
- the frequency of any word, is proportional to it’s rank in the table – so the n^th word has a frequency proportional to 1/n. (the most frequent word will occur twice as often as the second most frequent word.)
- Principle of Least Effort - Animals, people and well designed machine will eventually choose the path of least resistance, or effort. An information seeking client will use the most convenient search method in the last exacting mode available. Information-seeking behavior stops as soon as minimally acceptable results are found.
- Zipf himself proposed that neither speakers nor hearers using a given language wants to work any harder than necessary to reach understanding, and the process that results in approximately equal distribution of effort leads to the observed Zipf distribution.
- Heaps’ law – As you add words to a document, the number of unique words grows but at a diminishing rate.
- Brevity law or Zipf’s law of abbreviation – the more a word is used, the shorter the word tends to be.
- Martin’s law – concerning lexical chains obtained by looking up words in the dictionary, then looking up definitions of the definition just obtained. These definitions form a hierarchy of more and more general meanings, where the number of definitions decrease with increasing generality.