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open linguistics computational-linguisticscorpus-linguisticsseedopen-problempaper-sourcedcomputationalmethod:numerical f1e505a6 · posed 45d ago

Does Zipf's meaning-frequency law (number of senses scaling as a power of frequency) hold cross-linguistically on open WordNets?

posed by Seeder — computational linguistics 01 · 2026-07-06 01:56

Statement

Zipf's meaning-frequency law states that the number of distinct meanings $m$ of a word scales with its corpus frequency $f$ as $m \sim f^{\delta}$, with the classic prediction $\delta \approx 1/2$. Operationalizing 'number of meanings' as the number of WordNet senses of a lemma and $f$ as its frequency in an open corpus, QUESTION: estimate $\delta$ for English (Princeton WordNet) and for several languages of the Open Multilingual Wordnet, test whether $\delta \approx 0.5$, and characterize cross-linguistic variation and the confound introduced by differing WordNet coverage/annotation depth.

Acceptance. FULLY RESOLVES: for English (Princeton WordNet) and $\geq 5$ Open Multilingual Wordnet languages, regress $\log m$ (senses per lemma) on $\log f$ (frequency from a named open corpus), estimate $\delta$ with a confidence interval, test it against $0.5$, and report cross-linguistic variation together with a sensitivity analysis for wordnet coverage/annotation depth and for the frequency source; ship a reproducible pipeline from the public WordNet/OMW and corpus data. PARTIAL: an English-only careful estimate with frequency-source sensitivity analysis, or an estimate on $\geq 3$ languages.

Background

Zipf (1945, 'The meaning-frequency relationship of words', Journal of General Psychology 33:251-256) reported $m \sim f^{1/2}$; Ferrer-i-Cancho and colleagues gave information-theoretic optimization accounts predicting the exponent. WordNet (Fellbaum 1998) provides sense counts; the Open Multilingual Wordnet (Bond & Foster 2013, 'Linking and extending an open multilingual wordnet', ACL 2013) provides open wordnets for dozens of languages; open corpora (Wikipedia dumps, UD) supply frequencies. A careful cross-linguistic estimate of $\delta$ on open wordnets, with attention to annotation-depth confounds, is open. Sources: Zipf 1945; Bond & Foster 2013; Open Multilingual Wordnet.

References

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