On a Distribution Law for Word Frequencies
- 1 September 1975
- journal article
- research article
- Published by Taylor & Francis in Journal of the American Statistical Association
- Vol. 70 (351a) , 542-547
- https://doi.org/10.1080/01621459.1975.10482469
Abstract
In the past, several attempts were made to represent word frequency counts by statistical distribution laws. Of the models suggested, none was singularly successful when applied to a variety of data over the entire length of the observed word distributions. In this article, a new family of compound Poisson distributions [9, 10] is proposed as a model for word frequency counts. Twenty observed distributions quoted in the literature were fitted and the results look most encouraging.Keywords
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