In this paper we combine statistical analysis of large text databases and
simple stochastic models to explain the appearance of scaling laws in the
statistics of word frequencies. Besides the sublinear scaling of the vocabulary
size with database size (Heaps' law), here we report a new scaling of the
fluctuations around this average (fluctuation scaling analysis). We explain
both scaling laws by modeling the usage of words by simple stochastic processes
in which the overall distribution of word-frequencies is fat tailed (Zipf's
law) and the frequency of a single word is subject to fluctuations across
documents (as in topic models). In this framework, the mean and the variance of
the vocabulary size can be expressed as quenched averages, implying that: i)
the inhomogeneous dissemination of words cause a reduction of the average
vocabulary size in comparison to the homogeneous case, and ii) correlations in
the co-occurrence of words lead to an increase in the variance and the
vocabulary size becomes a non-self-averaging quantity. We address the
implications of these observations to the measurement of lexical richness. We
test our results in three large text databases (Google-ngram, Enlgish
Wikipedia, and a collection of scientific articles).

通过大型文本数据库的统计分析与简单随机模型的结合，解释了单词频率统计中的尺度律出现原因及其涵义，模型表示词频分布服从 Zipf's Law，并且单词的频率受到文章主题模型中波动的影响。同时，该文章还对词汇丰富度进行了测量和分析。