🔊New EMNLP paper from Eleonora Gualdoni & @gboleda.bsky.social !
Why do objects have many names?
Human lexicons contain different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., purple or magenta for the same color.
We investigate using tools from efficient coding...🧵
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Why do objects have many names?
Human lexicons contain different words that speakers can use to refer to the same object, e.g., purple or magenta for the same color.
We investigate using tools from efficient coding...🧵
1/3
Comments
...by taking into account
1⃣ in-context communication
2⃣ the hierarchical structure of the lexicon
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Lexical systems with a soft mapping between referents and names let speakers maximize communication accuracy while minimizing complexity.
Paper: https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.1009/
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