{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/is-space-a-word-too","title":"Is space a word, too?","arxiv_id":"1710.07729","date":"2017-10-20","proceeding":null,"authors":["Jake Ryland Williams","Giovanni C. Santia"],"abstract":"For words, rank-frequency distributions have long been heralded for adherence\nto a potentially-universal phenomenon known as Zipf's law. The hypothetical\nform of this empirical phenomenon was refined by Ben\\^{i}ot Mandelbrot to that\nwhich is presently referred to as the Zipf-Mandelbrot law. Parallel to this,\nHerbet Simon proposed a selection model potentially explaining Zipf's law.\nHowever, a significant dispute between Simon and Mandelbrot, notable empirical\nexceptions, and the lack of a strong empirical connection between Simon's model\nand the Zipf-Mandelbrot law have left the questions of universality and\nmechanistic generation open. We offer a resolution to these issues by\nexhibiting how the dark matter of word segmentation, i.e., space, punctuation,\netc., connect the Zipf-Mandelbrot law to Simon's mechanistic process. This\nexplains Mandelbrot's refinement as no more than a fudge factor, accommodating\nthe effects of the exclusion of the rank-frequency dark matter. Thus,\nintegrating these non-word objects resolves a more-generalized rank-frequency\nlaw. Since this relies upon the integration of space, etc., we find support for\nthe hypothesis that $all$ are generated by common processes, indicating from a\nphysical perspective that space is a word, too.","url_abs":"http://arxiv.org/abs/1710.07729v1","url_pdf":"http://arxiv.org/pdf/1710.07729v1.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"is-space-a-word-too","repo_url":"https://github.com/gsantia/Gutenberg","is_official":0,"mentioned_in_paper":0,"mentioned_in_github":1,"framework":"none","reach":null}],"tasks":[],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}