Reply to "Comment on 'A Scaling law beyond Zipf's law and its relation to Heaps' law'"

Abstract

In [arXiv:1404.1461], Yan and Minnhagen argue that the scaling law for the text-length dependence of word-frequency distributions proposed in [New J. Phys. 15 093033, arXiv:1303.0705] is "fundamentally incorrect" and "fundamentally impossible". In this note, we reason that such claims are clearly unjustified, with the scaling law being clearly valid for absolute frequencies greater than about 10. Further, we show that the very counter-example provided by Yan and Minnhagen [arXiv:1404.1461] fulfils our scaling hypothesis with excellent accuracy, at odds with Yan and Minnhagen's criticisms, and supporting our approach.