On a Distribution Law for Word Frequencies
H. S. Sichel · Journal of the American Statistical Association · 1975
In the past, several attempts were made to represent word frequency counts by statistical distribution laws. Of the models suggested, none was singularly successful when applied to a variety of data over the entire length of the observed word distributions. In this article, a new family of compound Poisson distributions [9, 10] is proposed as a model for word frequency counts. Twenty observed distributions quoted in the literature were fitted and the results look most encouraging.