3 papers
cs.CL2026
Agent-based imitation dynamics can yield efficiently compressed population-level vocabularies
Nathaniel Imel, Richard Futrell, Michael Franke +1
Natural languages have been argued to evolve under pressure to efficiently compress meanings into words by optimizing the Information Bottleneck (IB) complexity-accuracy tradeoff.…
cs.CL2025
Strategic resource allocation in memory encoding: An efficiency principle shaping language processing
Weijie Xu, Richard Futrell
How is the limited capacity of working memory efficiently used to support human linguistic behaviors? In this paper, we propose Strategic Resource Allocation (SRA) as an efficiency…
cs.CL2025
Clarifying orthography: Orthographic transparency as compressibility
Charles J. Torres, Richard Futrell
Orthographic transparency -- how directly spelling is related to sound -- lacks a unified, script-agnostic metric. Using ideas from algorithmic information theory, we quantify orth…