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Efficient compression in color naming and its evolution.

Noga Zaslavsky1,2, Charles Kemp3, Terry Regier2,4

  • 1Edmond and Lily Safra Center for Brain Sciences, The Hebrew University, Jerusalem 9190401, Israel; noga.zaslavsky@mail.huji.ac.il.

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PubMed
Summary
This summary is machine-generated.

Languages efficiently compress ideas using an information bottleneck (IB) trade-off. This principle explains cross-language color naming variations and category evolution, suggesting broader applications in semantic domains.

Keywords:
categoriescolor naminginformation theorylanguage evolutionsemantic typology

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Area of Science:

  • Cognitive Science
  • Linguistics
  • Information Theory

Background:

  • Cross-language semantic variation presents a challenge for understanding linguistic universals.
  • Existing models do not fully explain the systematicity observed in semantic systems like color naming.

Purpose of the Study:

  • To propose and test an information-theoretic account for cross-language semantic variation.
  • To investigate the role of the information bottleneck (IB) principle in shaping lexical systems.

Main Methods:

  • Derivation of an information-theoretic model based on the IB principle.
  • Empirical testing using color-naming data across languages.
  • Analysis of model parameters and their correlation with observed linguistic variation.

Main Results:

  • Color-naming systems demonstrate near-optimal compression, aligning with IB predictions.
  • A single IB trade-off parameter significantly explains cross-language variations.
  • IB models predict soft category boundaries and inconsistent naming, consistent with empirical findings.
  • IB systems exhibit evolutionary phase transitions mirroring existing color category evolution theories.

Conclusions:

  • Information-theoretic efficiency, specifically the IB trade-off, is a key driver of color-naming systems.
  • This principle offers a unified explanation for cross-language semantic variation and category evolution.
  • The IB framework may extend to other semantic domains beyond color.