Dissemin is shutting down on January 1st, 2025

Published in

Elsevier, Journal of Informetrics, 4(1), p. 277-286

DOI: 10.1016/j.joi.2007.07.001

Links

Tools

Export citation

Search in Google Scholar

Word statistics in Blogs and RSS feeds: Towards empirical universal evidence

Journal article published in 2007 by Renaud Lambiotte ORCID, Marcel Ausloos, Mike Thelwall
This paper is available in a repository.
This paper is available in a repository.

Full text: Download

Green circle
Preprint: archiving allowed
Red circle
Postprint: archiving forbidden
Red circle
Published version: archiving forbidden
Data provided by SHERPA/RoMEO

Abstract

We focus on the statistics of word occurrences and of the waiting times between such occurrences in Blogs. Due to the heterogeneity of words' frequencies, the empirical analysis is performed by studying classes of "frequently-equivalent" words, i.e. by grouping words depending on their frequencies. Two limiting cases are considered: the dilute limit, i.e. for those words that are used less than once a day, and the dense limit for frequent words. In both cases, extreme events occur more frequently than expected from the Poisson hypothesis. These deviations from Poisson statistics reveal non-trivial time correlations between events that are associated with bursts of activities. The distribution of waiting times is shown to behave like a stretched exponential and to have the same shape for different sets of words sharing a common frequency, thereby revealing universal features. ; Comment: 16 pages, 6 figures