Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language
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This article explains how language evolution can take advantage of a communicative phase transition and suggests that Zipf's law is a hallmark of symbolic reference and not a meaningless feature.Abstract:
The emergence of a complex language is one of the fundamental events of human evolution, and several remarkable features suggest the presence of fundamental principles of organization. These principles seem to be common to all languages. The best known is the so-called Zipf's law, which states that the frequency of a word decays as a (universal) power law of its rank. The possible origins of this law have been controversial, and its meaningfulness is still an open question. In this article, the early hypothesis of Zipf of a principle of least effort for explaining the law is shown to be sound. Simultaneous minimization in the effort of both hearer and speaker is formalized with a simple optimization process operating on a binary matrix of signal-object associations. Zipf's law is found in the transition between referentially useless systems and indexical reference systems. Our finding strongly suggests that Zipf's law is a hallmark of symbolic reference and not a meaningless feature. The implications for the evolution of language are discussed. We explain how language evolution can take advantage of a communicative phase transition.read more
Citations
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Conflict monitoring and decision making: reconciling two perspectives on anterior cingulate function.
TL;DR: Juxtaposing the conflict-monitoring and decision-making accounts suggests an extension of the Conflict-Monitoring theory, by which conflict would act as a teaching signal driving a form of avoidance learning, to bias behavioral decision making toward cognitively efficient tasks and strategies.
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The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging
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Zipf's word frequency law in natural language: a critical review and future directions.
TL;DR: It is shown that human language has a highly complex, reliable structure in the frequency distribution over and above Zipf’s law, although prior data visualization methods have obscured this fact.
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The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain
TL;DR: A review of The Symbolic Species: The Co-Evolution of Language and the Brain, by Terrance Deacon, 1997.
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Analyzing proteome topology and function by automated multidimensional fluorescence microscopy
Walter Schubert,Walter Schubert,Bernd Bonnekoh,Ansgar J. Pommer,Lars Philipsen,Raik Böckelmann,Yanina Malykh,Harald Gollnick,Manuela Friedenberger,Marcus Bode,Marcus Bode,Andreas W. M. Dress +11 more
TL;DR: By analyzing many cell and tissue types, this approach reveals rules of hierarchical protein network organization, in which the frequency distribution of different protein clusters obeys Zipf's law, and state-specific lead proteins appear to control protein network topology and function.
References
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On a class of skew distribution functions
TL;DR: In this paper, the authors analyse a class of distribution functions that appear in a wide range of empirical data-particularly data describing sociological, biological and economic phenomena-and look for an explanation of the observed close similarities among the five classes of distributions listed above.
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TL;DR: Buku ini berisi tiga bab ying merupakan perluasan dari sari kuliah ying dipresentasikan pada Universitas California as discussed by the authors.
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TL;DR: Deacon as mentioned in this paper provides fresh answers to long-standing questions of human origins and consciousness, drawing on his breakthrough research in comparative neuroscience, Terrence Deacon offers a wealth of insights into the significance of symbolic thinking: from the coevolutionary exchange between language and brains over two million years of hominid evolution to the ethical repercussions that followed man's newfound access to other people's thoughts and emotions.