The Log-Log Term Frequency Distribution

Though commonly used, the unigram is widely known as being a poor model of term frequency; it assumes that term occurrences are independent, whereas many words, especially topic-oriented ones, tend to occur in bursts. Herein, we propose a model of term frequency that treats words independently, but allows for much higher variance in frequency values than does the unigram. Although it has valuable properties, and may be useful as a teaching tool, we are not able to find any applications that make a compelling case for its use.