{"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/"}]}