Two Universality Properties Associated with the Monkey Model of Zipf’s Law

The distribution of word probabilities in the monkey model of Zipf’s law is associated with two universality properties: (1) the exponent in the approximate power law approaches −1 as the alphabet size increases and the letter probabilities are specified as the spacings from a random division of the unit interval for any distribution with a bounded density function on [0,1]; and (2), on a logarithmic scale the version of the model with a finite word length cutoff and unequal letter probabilities is approximately normally distributed in the part of the distribution away from the tails. The first property is proved using a remarkably general limit theorem from Shao and Hahn for the logarithm of sample spacings constructed on [0,1] and the second property follows from Anscombe’s central limit theorem for a random number of independent and identically distributed (i.i.d.) random variables. The finite word length model leads to a hybrid Zipf-lognormal mixture distribution closely related to work in other areas.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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