On variation of word frequencies in Russian literary texts

We study the variation of word frequencies in Russian literary texts. Our findings indicate that the standard deviation of a word’s frequency across texts depends on its average frequency according to a power lawwith exponent 2 < α < 1, which shows that the rarer words have a relatively larger degree of frequency volatility (that is, higher ‘‘burstiness’’). A latent factor model has been estimated to investigate the structure of the word frequency distribution. The findings suggest that the dependence of a word’s frequency volatility on its average frequency can be explained by the asymmetry in the distribution of latent factors. © 2015 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.