Events / SCEW Seminar: Rafael Ventura

SCEW Seminar: Rafael Ventura

March 6, 2020
10:00 AM - 11:00 AM

202 Lynch Labs, 433 S. University Avenue, Philadelphia, PA 19104

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.