04.05.2021

Effects of Noise on the Grammar of Voronoi Languages

Oberseminar "General & Theoretical Linguistics" by Gerrit Bauch

Time & place: Tuesday, May 4th, 10.15 am - 11.45 pm, Zoom

Zoom link: https://zoom.us/j/92671301312
Meeting ID: 926 7130 1312
Passcode: 455908

Speaker: Gerrit Bauch, University of Bielefeld

Title: Effects of Noise on the Grammar of Voronoi Languages

Abstract: We study a signaling game of common interest in which a stochastic noise is perturbing the communication between sender and receiver. Despite this inhibiting factor efficient languages still exist. In any equilibrium, sender uses a tessellation consisting of convex cells while receiver uses Bayesian estimators as interpretations. Low levels of error that respect the distance between words lead to concise interpretations in the decoding process. Comparative statics for increasing noise describe robustness of different grammatical structures. Evolutionary modeling approaches converge to equilibria, but not every equilibrium is stable.

More information about this and past talks in the Oberseminar can be found here: https://uni-tuebingen.de/de/133999.