Naming on a directed graph

Abstract

We address how the structure of a social communication system affects language coordination. The naming game is an abstraction of lexical acquisition dynamics, in which N agents try to find an agreement on the names to give to objects. Most results on naming games are specific to certain communication network topologies. We present two important results that are general to any graph topology: the first proves that under certain topologies the system always converges to a name-object agreement; the second proves that if these conditions are not met the system may end up in a state in which sub-networks with different competing object-name associations coexist. © 2011 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.