title: Emergence of Zipf's law in the evolution of communication.
abstract: 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.
authors.affiliation: ICREA-Complex Systems Lab, Universitat Pompeu Fabra-Parc de Recerca Biomèdica de Barcelona (PRBB), Dr Aiguader 88, E-08003 Barcelona, Spain.
authors.forename: Bernat
authors.initials: B
authors.lastname: Corominas-Murtra
authors.forename: Jordi
authors.initials: J
authors.lastname: Fortuny
authors.forename: Ricard V
authors.initials: RV
authors.lastname: Solé
mesh_terms: D007257:Information Theory; D007802:Language; D013997:Time Factors