dc.contributor.author |
Casal Santiago, Miguel Ángel |
dc.date.accessioned |
2019-10-29T10:42:28Z |
dc.date.available |
2019-10-29T10:42:28Z |
dc.date.issued |
2019 |
dc.identifier.uri |
http://hdl.handle.net/10230/42539 |
dc.description |
Treball fi de màster de: Master in Intelligent Interactive Systems |
dc.description |
Tutors: Luís F. Seoane, Ricard Solé |
dc.description.abstract |
There is an open issue about optimality in human language, which might be behind
some universal features observed across tongues. These features may stem from a
tension between hearers and speakers when trying to minimize costs associated to
their usage of language. Optimality issues might be also critical to understand the
evolution of the language faculty. A toy model introduced by Ferrer i Cancho and
Solé captures the tension between hearers and speakers. In it, tongues are reduced
to a mapping from signals to objects of an external world. Theoretical studies
grounded in information theory followed this study, but the framework remains of
limited empirical use due to the difficulty of building word-objects mappings for real
tongues. There was a recent attempt by Seoane using WordNet, but this database
has some relevant limitations such as the lack of data for some grammatical classes.
In this project, we look at alternative ways to map empirical data from human
languages into the aforementioned least effort information-theory framework. Human
language consistently falls within one of two related categories: i) fairly optimal
(both for hearers and speakers simultaneously) mappings; and ii) less simultaneously
optimal word-object mappings, yet presenting interesting features such as diverse
clustering of concepts and good fitness to Zipf’s law of word frequency.
Our novel empirical analysis of linguistic data allows us to consider more grammatical
classes and to bring together words from different classes coherently. Our
results offer intuitive representations of human languages into an abstract space
where they can be compared with other communication systems. This also offers a
way to quantify the relevance of both conflicting views about optimality in human
language introduced above. As far as optimality could be disregarded, our results
also suggest alternative pressures that might have shaped human language. Future
work will be aimed at scaling the proposed methodology to larger sets of data to
support our findings. |
dc.format.mimetype |
application/pdf |
dc.language.iso |
eng |
dc.rights |
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 3.0 España |
dc.rights.uri |
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/es/ |
dc.subject.other |
Automatització -- Traductors |
dc.title |
Testing optimality in the morphospace of language networks with empirical data |
dc.type |
info:eu-repo/semantics/masterThesis |
dc.subject.keyword |
Language |
dc.subject.keyword |
Least effort |
dc.subject.keyword |
Evolution |
dc.subject.keyword |
Optimality |
dc.subject.keyword |
Morphospace |
dc.rights.accessRights |
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |