Dresden 2014 – scientific programme
Parts | Days | Selection | Search | Updates | Downloads | Help
SOE: Fachverband Physik sozio-ökonomischer Systeme
SOE 8: Focus Session: Complex Systems Approaches to Language and Communication
SOE 8.5: Talk
Tuesday, April 1, 2014, 11:45–12:15, GÖR 226
Agent-based models of consensus in language dynamics — •Martina Pugliese1, Christine Cuskley2, Claudio Castellano2, Francesca Colaiori2, Vittorio Loreto1,3, and Francesca Tria3 — 1Physics Department, Sapienza University, Rome, Italy — 2Institute for Complex Systems (ISC-CNR), Rome, Italy — 3Institute for Scientific Interchange (ISI), Turin, Italy
The emergence of consensus in language dynamics can be studied in the framework known as the Naming Game (NG), where agents engage in pairwise interactions about naming an object and achieve a stable vocabulary, with a convergence-time depending on the network used and on the population replacement rate.
We have implemented a NG-like model investigating morphology where the focus is given on a fixed set of topic words chosen with an a priori frequency distribution. We examine processes of regularisation from two different perspectives: memory and development. Memory limitations are dictated by an expanding time window within which a word must be encountered to be recalled by an agent, otherwise the agent “forgets” the inflection for that word and falls back on the regular rule. The second strategy examines population turnover as a probabilistic replacement: if chosen as a speaker, a new agent defaults to the regular form.
Both strategies result in a frequency-based transition of regularity: high frequency words stabilise indefinitely in the irregular state, while those at low frequency regularise. With a mean-field approach we show that the transition is discontinuous.