The 2024-2025 colloquium series continues on Monday, March 3, with a talk by our very own Terry Regier, taking place in Dwinelle 370 and on Zoom (passcode: lx-colloq) from 3:10-4:30pm. His talk is entitled "Cultural evolution explains efficient semantic systems." The abstract is as follows:
It has been argued that systems of semantic categories across languages reflect functional pressure for efficient communication. There is also a long tradition of approaching systems of semantic categories in terms of cultural evolution: the process by which a cultural convention changes as it is repeatedly learned and used in communication. I will present recent computational work with Emil Carlsson and Devdatt Dubhashi that connects these two approaches. We find that (1) an existing model of cultural evolution produces color naming systems that are both efficient and similar to attested systems from a range of languages; and (2) this model of cultural evolution helps us understand an important case in which optimally efficient systems do not match empirical data. We argue that these two approaches taken together yield a more comprehensive understanding than either one taken alone.