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{
    "pk": 26950,
    "title": "Optimization of American English, Spanish, and Mandarin Chinese over time forefficient communication",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Frequent words tend to be short, and many researchers haveproposed that this relationship reflects a tendency towards ef-ficient communication. Recent work has sought to formalizethis observation in the context of information theory, which es-tablishes a limit on communicative efficiency called the chan-nel capacity. In this paper, I first show that the compositionalstructure of natural language prevents natural language com-munication from getting close to the channel capacity, but thata different limit, which incorporates probability in context,may be achievable. Next, I present two corpus studies in threetypologically-diverse languages that provide evidence that lan-guages change over time towards the achievable limit. Theseresults suggest that natural language optimizes for efficiencyover time, and does so in a way that is appopriate for compo-sitional codes.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Communicative efficiency; Uniform InformationDensity; Smooth Signal Hypothesis; Noisy channel"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Talks: Papers",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/3m77c97x",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "John",
            "middle_name": "K.",
            "last_name": "Pate",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "University at Buffalo",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2017-01-01T18:00:00Z",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26950/galley/16586/download/"
        }
    ]
}