Efficient compression in color naming and its evolution

132Citations
Citations of this article
122Readers
Mendeley users who have this article in their library.

Abstract

We derive a principled information-theoretic account of cross-language semantic variation. Specifically, we argue that languages efficiently compress ideas into words by optimizing the information bottleneck (IB) trade-off between the complexity and accuracy of the lexicon. We test this proposal in the domain of color naming and show that (i) color-naming systems across languages achieve near-optimal compression; (ii) small changes in a single trade-off parameter account to a large extent for observed cross-language variation; (iii) efficient IB color-naming systems exhibit soft rather than hard category boundaries and often leave large regions of color space inconsistently named, both of which phenomena are found empirically; and (iv) these IB systems evolve through a sequence of structural phase transitions, in a single process that captures key ideas associated with different accounts of color category evolution. These results suggest that a drive for information-theoretic efficiency may shape color-naming systems across languages. This principle is not specific to color, and so it may also apply to cross-language variation in other semantic domains.

Cite

CITATION STYLE

APA

Zaslavsky, N., Kemp, C., Regier, T., & Tishby, N. (2018). Efficient compression in color naming and its evolution. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 115(31), 7937–7942. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1800521115

Register to see more suggestions

Mendeley helps you to discover research relevant for your work.

Already have an account?

Save time finding and organizing research with Mendeley

Sign up for free