Journal article
Efficient compression in color naming and its evolution
N Zaslavsky, C Kemp, T Regier, N Tishby
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America | NATL ACAD SCIENCES | Published : 2018
Abstract
We derive a principled information-theoretic account of cross-language semantic variation. Specifically, we argue that languages efficiently compress ideas into words by optimizing the information bottleneck (IB) trade-off between the complexity and accuracy of the lexicon. We test this proposal in the domain of color naming and show that (i) color-naming systems across languages achieve near-optimal compression; (ii) small changes in a single trade-off parameter account to a large extent for observed cross-language variation; (iii) efficient IB color-naming systems exhibit soft rather than hard category boundaries and often leave large regions of color space inconsistently named, both of wh..
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Awarded by Defense Threat Reduction Agency
Funding Acknowledgements
We thank Daniel Reichman for facilitating the initial stages of our collaboration, Delwin Lindsey and Angela Brown for kindly sharing their English color-naming data with us, Bevil Conway and Ted Gibson for kindly sharing their color-salience data with us, and Paul Kay for useful discussions. This study was supported by the Gatsby Charitable Foundation (N.T.), IBM PhD Fellowship Award (to N.Z.), and Defense Threat Reduction Agency (DTRA) Award HDTRA11710042 (to T.R.). Part of this work was done while N.Z. and N.T. were visiting the Simons Institute for the Theory of Computing at University of California, Berkeley.