Dresden 2014 – scientific programme

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SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme

SOE 7: Social Networks and Language Dynamics (Invited Talk Francesca Tria)

SOE 7.1: Invited Talk

Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 09:30–10:15, GÖR 226

Language and Innovation dynamics — •Francesca Tria — Institute for Scientific Interchange, Torino, Italy

Complex systems approaches have proven to be effective in shedding light into the emergence of language structures and communication systems. Examples range from explaining the origin of names, categories and syntactic structures to the emergence of languages in contact ecologies. After having shortly reviewed these research lines, I'll focus on a very interesting feature that language share with many other social, biological and technological systems, namely the connection with innovation processes. The adjacent possible concept, first introduced by Stuart Kauffman, relates to the notion that first times at the individual or collective level are often triggered by some earlier novelties, thus providing a correlation between them. I will quantify and test this idea against four data sets capturing human activities: the early adoption of new words in texts, the edit events of Wikipedia pages, the emergence of tags in annotation systems, and listening to new songs in online music catalogues. I will show through a simple modeling scheme that the process of exploring a space that enlarges itself whenever a new boundary is touched, accounts for the laws for the innovation rate as observed in real data (analogous to Heaps' law), for the probability distribution on the space explored (analogous to Zipf's law), as well as statistical signatures of the hypothesized triggering of one innovation by another. I will finally discuss related ongoing projects and perspectives.