Show simple item record

dc.contributor.authorPolani, D.
dc.date.accessioned2011-01-27T12:03:19Z
dc.date.available2011-01-27T12:03:19Z
dc.date.issued2010
dc.identifier.citationPolani , D 2010 , ' Phase transitions in least-effort communications ' , Journal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment (JSTAT) , vol. 11 , no. 11 , pp. 11025 . https://doi.org/10.1088/1742-5468/2010/11/P11025
dc.identifier.issn1742-5468
dc.identifier.otherdspace: 2299/5246
dc.identifier.otherORCID: /0000-0002-3233-5847/work/86098081
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/2299/5246
dc.descriptionOriginal article can be found at: http://iopscience.iop.org Copyright IOP Publishing
dc.description.abstractWe critically examine a model that attempts to explain the emergence of power laws (e.g., Zipf's law) in human language. The model is based on the principle of least effort in communications—specifically, the overall effort is balanced between the speaker effort and listener effort, with some trade-off. It has been shown that an information-theoretic interpretation of this principle is sufficiently rich to explain the emergence of Zipf's law in the vicinity of the transition between referentially useless systems (one signal for all referable objects) and indexical reference systems (one signal per object). The phase transition is defined in the space of communication accuracy (information content) expressed in terms of the trade-off parameter. Our study explicitly solves the continuous optimization problem, subsuming a recent, more specific result obtained within a discrete space. The obtained results contrast Zipf's law found by heuristic search (that attained only local minima) in the vicinity of the transition between referentially useless systems and indexical reference systems, with an inverse-factorial (sub-logarithmic) law found at the transition that corresponds to global minima. The inverse-factorial law is observed to be the most representative frequency distribution among optimal solutions.en
dc.format.extent356970
dc.language.isoeng
dc.relation.ispartofJournal of Statistical Mechanics: Theory and Experiment (JSTAT)
dc.subjectStochastic search
dc.subjectexact results
dc.subjectcommunication
dc.subjectsupply and information networks
dc.titlePhase transitions in least-effort communicationsen
dc.contributor.institutionSchool of Computer Science
dc.contributor.institutionScience & Technology Research Institute
dc.description.statusPeer reviewed
rioxxterms.versionofrecord10.1088/1742-5468/2010/11/P11025
rioxxterms.typeJournal Article/Review
herts.preservation.rarelyaccessedtrue


Files in this item

Thumbnail

This item appears in the following Collection(s)

Show simple item record