Information Technology Reference
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There is no theoretical proof that Zipf's law applies to most languages (Brillouin, 2004), but
Wentian Li (Li, 1992) demonstrated empirical evidence supporting the validity of Zipf's law
in the domain of language. Li generated a document by choosing each character at random
from a uniform distribution including letters and the space character. Its words follow the
general trend of Zipf's law. Some experts explain this linguistic phenomenon as a natural
conservation of effort in which speakers and hearers minimize the work needed to reach
understanding, resulting in an approximately equal distribution of effort consistent with the
observed Zipf distribution (Ferrer, 2003).
Fig. 1. Zipf's law for English
Whatever the underlying cause of this behavior, word distribution has established
correspondences between social activities and natural and biological phenomena. As
language is a natural instrument for representation and communication (Altmann, 2004), it
becomes a particularly interesting and promising domain for exploration and indirect
analysis of social activity, and it offers a way to understand how humans perform
conceptualization. Word meaning is directly related to its distribution and location in
context. A word's position is also related to its thematic importance and its usefulness as a
keyword (López De Luise, 2008b, 2008c). This kind of information (recurrence, distribution
and position) is strongly correlated with morphosyntactic analysis and strongly supports
"views of human conceptual structure” in which all concepts, no matter how abstract,
directly or indirectly engage contextually specific experience tracing language in the ever
larger digital databases of human communications can be a most promising tool for tracing
human and social dynamics". Thus, morphosyntactic analysis offers a new and promising
tool for the study of dynamic social interaction. (Altmann, 2004).
1.2 Why morphosyntactic wavelets?
The evidence that wavelets offer the best description of such morphosyntactic
decomposition is revealed by comparing the details of both traditional and
morphosyntactical analyses.
