Non-Zipfian Distribution of Stopwords or Function Words and Subset Selection Models
Stopwords and function words are relatively less informative for the content of a language and more often play a structural role in a sentence. Stopwords are ubiquitous words and may contain verbs, adjectives and adverbs. On the other hand, function words are strictly prepositions, conjunctions, pronouns, determiners, qualifiers, articles, interrogatives, and a limited number of auxiliary verbs. In contrast to the well known Zipf's law for rank-frequency plot for all words, the rank-frequency plots for stopwords or function words are best fitted by the Beta Rank Function (BRF). On the other hand, the rank-frequency plots of non-stopwords or non-function-words also deviate from the Zipf's ...
| Authors | Wentian Li, Oscar Fontanelli |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 5 March 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 23 July 2026 |
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