Emergence of Zipf’s law in the evolution of communication
Zipf’s law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and hearer in a communication system, we introduce evolution by means of a variational approach to the problem based on Kullback’s Minimum Discrimination of Information Principle. Therefore, using a formalism fully embedded in the framework of information theory, we demonstrate that Zipf’s law is the only expected outcome of an evolving communicative system under a rigorous definition of the communicative tension described by Zipf.
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| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Other Authors: | |
| Format: | artículo biblioteca |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
American Physical Society
2011-03-28
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| Subjects: | Zipf's law, Scaling, Evolution of codes, Minimum Discrimination of Information Principle, |
| Online Access: | http://hdl.handle.net/10261/42527 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/501100004837 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000913 http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100011419 |
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| Summary: | Zipf’s law seems to be ubiquitous in human languages and appears to be a universal property of complex communicating systems. Following the early proposal made by Zipf concerning the presence of a tension between the efforts of speaker and hearer in a communication system, we introduce evolution by means of a variational approach to the problem based on Kullback’s Minimum Discrimination of Information Principle. Therefore, using a formalism fully embedded in the framework of information theory, we demonstrate that Zipf’s law is the only expected outcome of an evolving communicative system under a rigorous definition of the communicative tension described by Zipf. |
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