AN ANALYSIS OF ZIPF-MANDELBROT LANGUAGE MEASURES AND THEIR APPLICATION TO ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGES

Studies of word frequency distributions have been used in linguistics for some time and are frequently used in information science research for such purposes as predicting numbers of key words or computing the significance of a word by its frequency of occurrence. In this paper w e provide a historical review of some of the developments in a particu lar aspect of word frequency analysis known as Zipfs Law but in fact f irst explicitly formulated by E.U. Condon, and later modified by B. Ma ndelbrot. We present an exploratory analysis of the use of Mandelbrot' s parameters in discriminating among languages and language usage. Som e suggestions are made for using these parameters to characterize arti ficial (command) languages or the manner of use of these languages by different groups, for the purpose of enabling a computer interface to respond to users in a manner suited to their backgrounds or skills.