Zipf’s Law hits me over and over again in emails. I’m on various and sundry LIMSI and French natural language processing mailing lists, and usually have to look up something or other to read them. Here’s today’s words:
- la candidature: application. In politics, it’s candidacy. An email about a plan to apply to host a conference started with this sentence (how like Zipf’s Law to strike in the very first sentence): Nous continuons à préparer une candidature pour la conférence JEP-TALN 2016.
- intitulé: entitled, titled. In the context of talking about a text, it’s a noun meaning “title” or “heading.”
Le jeudi 4 Septembre nous recevrons Ryo Nagata qui nous présentera un exposé intitulé: “Après un an — fruits du travail au LIMSI et après”. (Remember exposé from a previous post, also about a talk?)
Only two words ’cause I only have two French emails in my Inbox!
Zipf's Law 
Only two (2)? Perhaps I’m assuming that if Zipf attacks you in the first sentence, you’ll be subject to a deluge over the course of the text!
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You raise an interesting issue about “burstiness,” if that’s a real word. I actually do worry about that in the context of work that I do on other statistical properties of large samples of language.
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