| Zipf_n_Heaps {tm} | R Documentation |
Explore Corpus Term Frequency Characteristics
Description
Explore Zipf's law and Heaps' law, two empirical laws in linguistics describing commonly observed characteristics of term frequency distributions in corpora.
Usage
Zipf_plot(x, type = "l", ...)
Heaps_plot(x, type = "l", ...)
Arguments
x |
a document-term matrix or term-document matrix with unweighted term frequencies. |
type |
a character string indicating the type of plot to be
drawn, see |
... |
further graphical parameters to be used for plotting. |
Details
Zipf's law (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zipf%27s_law)
states that given some corpus of natural language utterances, the
frequency of any word is inversely proportional to its rank in the
frequency table, or, more generally, that the pmf of the term
frequencies is of the form c k^{-\beta}, where k is the
rank of the term (taken from the most to the least frequent one).
We can conveniently explore the degree to which the law holds by
plotting the logarithm of the frequency against the logarithm of the
rank, and inspecting the goodness of fit of a linear model.
Heaps' law (e.g., https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heaps%27_law)
states that the vocabulary size V (i.e., the number of different
terms employed) grows polynomially with the text size T (the
total number of terms in the texts), so that V = c T^\beta.
We can conveniently explore the degree to which the law holds by
plotting \log(V) against \log(T), and inspecting the
goodness of fit of a linear model.
Value
The coefficients of the fitted linear model. As a side effect, the corresponding plot is produced.
Examples
data("acq")
m <- DocumentTermMatrix(acq)
Zipf_plot(m)
Heaps_plot(m)