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{
    "pk": 49500,
    "title": "Efficient compression in locomotion verbs across languages",
    "subtitle": null,
    "abstract": "Converging evidence suggests that languages are shaped by\na drive for efficient communication. In particular, it has\nbeen shown that languages efficiently compress meanings\ninto words via the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle in\ndomains ranging from visual percepts, such as colors and\nobjects, to non-visual high-level concepts, such as pronouns\nand number. These domains, however, capture only static\nelements described by adjectives, nouns, function words, or\ngrammatical markers, leaving open the question of whether the\nsame theory could also apply to verb meanings, which often\nrefer to dynamical aspects of the environment. We address\nthis question by considering locomotion verbs (e.g., walk, run,\nand jump) across four languages (English, Dutch, Spanish,\nand Japanese). We show that locomotion verb meanings\nacross languages are shaped by pressure for efficiency, which\nresonates with similar findings in other domains and suggests\nthat the IB principle may apply more broadly across the\nlexicon. Our results also open a new avenue for future work\nto explore whether semantic categories of actions are rooted\nin a strictly perceptual representation, or perhaps in motor and\nfunctional representations as well.",
    "language": "eng",
    "license": {
        "name": "",
        "short_name": "",
        "text": null,
        "url": ""
    },
    "keywords": [
        {
            "word": "Linguistics; Concepts and categories; Natural Language Processing; Semantics of language; Bayesian modeling; Computational Modeling"
        }
    ],
    "section": "Papers with Poster Presentation",
    "is_remote": true,
    "remote_url": "https://escholarship.org/uc/item/48w0h6jw",
    "frozenauthors": [
        {
            "first_name": "Thomas",
            "middle_name": "A",
            "last_name": "Langlois",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "MIT",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Roger",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Levy",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "Massachusetts Institute of Technology",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Nidhi",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Seethapathi",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "MIT",
            "department": ""
        },
        {
            "first_name": "Noga",
            "middle_name": "",
            "last_name": "Zaslavsky",
            "name_suffix": "",
            "institution": "NYU",
            "department": ""
        }
    ],
    "date_submitted": null,
    "date_accepted": null,
    "date_published": "2025-01-01T13:00:00-05:00",
    "render_galley": null,
    "galleys": [
        {
            "label": "PDF",
            "type": "pdf",
            "path": "https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/49500/galley/37462/download/"
        }
    ]
}