Understanding Linguistic Evolution by Visualizing the Emergence of Topographic Mappings

Authors:
Henry Brighton;Simon Kirby
Affiliations:
Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK;Language Evolution and Computation Research Unit, School of Philosophy, Psychology, and Language Sciences, The University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh, UK
Venue:
Artificial Life
Year:
2006

Citing 7
Cited 2

Instance-Based Learning Algorithms

Machine Learning
Faithful Representations and Topographic Maps: From Distortion- to Information-Based Self-Organization

Faithful Representations and Topographic Maps: From Distortion- to Information-Based Self-Organization
Self-Organizing Maps

Self-Organizing Maps
Natural language from artificial life

Artificial Life
Compositional Syntax From Cultural Transmission

Artificial Life
Situated cognition and the role of multi-agent models in explaining language structure

Adaptive agents and multi-agent systems
Spontaneous evolution of linguistic structure-an iterated learningmodel of the emergence of regularity and irregularity

IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation

Picture This: The State of the Art in Visualization for Complex Adaptive Systems

Artificial Life
Evolving distributed representations for language with self-organizing maps

EELC'06 Proceedings of the Third international conference on Emergence and Evolution of Linguistic Communication: symbol Grounding and Beyond

Quantified Score

Hi-index	0.00

Visualization

Abstract

We show how cultural selection for learnability during the process of linguistic evolution can be visualized using a simple iterated learning model. Computational models of linguistic evolution typically focus on the nature of, and conditions for, stable states. We take a novel approach and focus on understanding the process of linguistic evolution itself. What kind of evolutionary system is this process? Using visualization techniques, we explore the nature of replicators in linguistic evolution, and argue that replicators correspond to local regions of regularity in the mapping between meaning and signals. Based on this argument, we draw parallels between phenomena observed in the model and linguistic phenomena observed across languages. We then go on to identify issues of replication and selection as key points of divergence in the parallels between the processes of linguistic evolution and biological evolution.