Cultural evolution via iterated learning and communication explains efficient color naming systems

arXiv:2305.10154v2 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: It has been argued that semantic systems reflect pressure for efficiency, and a current debate concerns the cultural evolutionary process that produces this pattern. We consider efficiency as instantiated in the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, and a model of cultural evolution that combines iterated learning and communication. We show that this model, instantiated in neural networks, converges to color naming systems that are efficient in the IB sense and similar to human color naming systems. …

abstract arxiv color communication concerns cs.cl current efficiency evolution information process semantic systems the information type via