# name
Emergence of Zipf's law in the Evolution of Communication

# metadata.dc.description.abstract[].value
Zipf's law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and hearer in a communication system, we introduce evolution by means of a variational approach to the problem based on Kullback's Minimum Discrimination of Information Principle. Therefore, using a formalism fully embedded in the framework of information theory, we demonstrate that Zipf's law is the only expected outcome of an evolving communicative system under a rigorous definition of the communicative tension described by Zipf.

# metadata.dc.relation.ispartof[].value
Physical Review E, 2011, vol. 83, num. 3

# metadata.dc.source[].value
Articles publicats en revistes (Filologia Catalana i Lingüística General)

# metadata.dc.title[].value
Emergence of Zipf's law in the Evolution of Communication