1. Zipf’s Law
THE MYSTERIOUS LAW THAT GOVERNS LANGUAGES
AND LITERATURES DISTRIBUTION
Group 1 | SIF2005 STATISTICAL PHYSICS | SEM 1 2017/2018
2. PAGE 1
Introduction
Zipf's law arose out of an analysis of language by linguist George
Kingsley Zipf (1902-1950), who theorised that given a large body of
language, the frequency of each word is close to inversely proportional to
its rank in the frequency table.
This is known as a "power law" and suggests that the most frequent
word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent
word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, etc. A
famous study of the Brown Corpus found that its words accorded to Zipf's
law quite well, with "the" being the most frequently occurring word
(accounting for nearly 7% of all word occurrences — 69,971 out of slightly
over 1 million), and "of" the second most frequent (3.5% of all words).
This project attempted to describe Zipf’s Law by relating it to
Pareto’s Principle, Principle of Least Effort and Preferential Attachment
Process. We made some attractive content by also conducting our own
analysis of local literatures which are Chinese Literature(民间的房子 - for
the word, 吊古战场文-for the tone), Indonesian literature (Indonesian
Constitution 1945, The Book of the Criminal Law (KUHP)), and Japanese
literature (Kachoufugetsu by Aimer). In addition, we performed a simple
demonstration which may resemble the mechanism of Zipf Law using paper
clips.
We also introduced some benefits in studying Zipf’s Law, which
allowed researchers to decipher long lost ancient languages by utilizing
Zipf’s Law, and that Zipf’s Law also suggest it is easy to be fluent in any
language by mastering 20% of the language’s content ( vocabulary,
grammar, structure, etc. )
3. PAGE 2
Team contribution
Taking the role as the Project Designer, Goh Zhi Ling (SIB160005) led
the whole team by delegating and supervising tasks to the group members.
She offered various insights related to the project in order to ensure this
project a successful one.
The Technical Team are composed of members Hilmi Syawal bin
Hoiruddin Syawal (SIB160006), and Muhammad Shahrul Arif Bin Adi Rumi
(SIF160050). They were assigned to explore and collect resources in order
to develop feasible concepts and ideas for the project’s presentation, in
addition of analyzing Zipf’s Law in local literatures with the help of other
group members.
Also, Muhammad Shahrul Arif Bin Adi Rumi was appointed to
prepare the presentation slides with beautiful designs, exciting videos and
pictures, and most essential, the simple but critical descriptions and texts.
The product of this task will later be utilised by Ibnu Syafiq Imamuddin
(SEM150702), the Science Communicator of the project. His affair was to
engage with the audience of the project’s presentation and effectively
explain them our project’s ideas and concepts with befitting
communication skills.
4. PAGE 3
Reflection
The project was a success, with slight improvements needed for
future project plans.
First and foremost, the project got a late kickstart because all team
members got their hands full with other commitments which were college
projects and university sports.This setback was probably the roots of the
proceeding weaknesses of this project. The analysis was conducted about 2
weeks before the date of presentation.
Also, unfortunately during the presentation day, we were unable to
fully elaborate and point out the interesting facts, ideas and
demonstrations, which were diligently and eagerly planned and prepared,
because of short on time. Since we were the second group to make
appearance of our project, the group before us may nicked some of our
time to present our project. The presentation of local literature analysis
may also was extended beyond the allocated time.
On the bright side, we successfully gave our presentation to the
audience in an engaging and inspiring environment. Our Technical Team
managed to hoard suitable resources and displayed the best of them, which
we started by piquing our audience’s interest by presenting our local
literature analysis, then proceeded to explanations about Zipf Law by
alternating between statements, concepts and ideas, and a demonstration
and theoretical models. We concluded our presentation by emphasizing the
significance in understanding the mysteries of Zipf Law.
As our final remark, we are entertained by handling this project, that
we were able to experience the thrill in exploring various future prospects
in multidisciplinary studies, in addition of developing our teamwork and
communication skills. We hope and are eager to take up many more
chances and exciting issues in the near future.
