[CaCL] Next Monday

[Fred Mailhot]

Hi everyone,

Next Monday (03/07), Dahee will be leading/facilitating discussion of 
the following (short!) PNAS paper. See you there!

Fred.



Piantadosi, Tily & Gibson (2010). Word lengths are optimized for 
efficient communication.

http://www.pnas.org/content/108/9/3526

Abstract:
We demonstrate a substantial improvement on one of the most celebrated 
empirical laws in the study of language, Zipf's 75-y-old theory that 
word length is primarily determined by frequency of use. In accord with 
rational theories of communication, we show across 10 languages that 
average information content is a much better predictor of word length 
than frequency. This indicates that human lexicons are efficiently 
structured for communication by taking into account interword 
statistical dependencies. Lexical systems result from an optimization of 
communicative pressures, coding meanings efficiently given the complex 
statistics of natural language use.