Heaps' law
Ley de Heaps
- Date
- 1978 · confidence low
- Place
- Toronto, Ontario, Canada
- Credited to
- Described by Harold Stanley Heaps in 1978; the same empirical pattern had already been noted by linguist Gustav Herdan in 1960, hence it is also called Herdan's law.
- Field
- Knowledge & symbols
What was discovered
Empirical law describing the number of distinct words in a text as a power-law function V(n)=Kn^β of its length n, useful for estimating index sizes in information retrieval.
What it led to
- Estimation of index size in search engines
- Reference tool in quantitative linguistics
- Comparison with Zipf's law on word frequency