Zipf and Heaps Laws’ Coefficients Depend on Language

Abstract

We observed that the coefficients of two important empirical statisti- cal laws of language - Zipf law and Heaps law - are different for different lan- guages, as we illustrate on English and Russian examples. This may have both theoretical and practical implications. On the one hand, the reasons for this may shed light on the nature of language. On the other hand, these two laws are im- portant in, say, full-text database design allowing predicting the index size.

The work was done under partial support of CONACyT, REDII, and SNI, Mexico. We thank Prof. R. Baeza-Yates, Prof. E. Atwell, and Prof. I. Bolshakov for useful discussion.