Rafael Ventura
SCEW Postdoctoral Fellow

Signaling Games

Lewis (1969) introduced signaling games to show how communication emerges when rational agents imbue simple actions with conventional meaning. Since then, signaling games have given rise to a rich field of study. In this talk, I first provide a brief introduction to signaling games. I then propose versions of the game that help us understand some large-scale patterns observed in natural languages—namely, Zipf’s law relating word frequency and rank, and the negative correlation between word frequency and rate of change. To conclude, I single out open questions and sketch tentative ways to test the model framework experimentally.