Revisiting the optimality of word lengths.

Abstract: Zipf posited that wordforms are optimized to minimize utterances' communicative costs. He supported this claim by showing that words' lengths are inversely correlated with their frequencies. This correlation, however, is only expected if one assumes that a words' communicative cost is given by its length. In this talk, we will explore this assumption, comparing the predictive power over word lengths we get when assuming different operationalisations of communicative cost.

Computer scienceMathematics

Audience: researchers in the discipline

Seminar on Algorithmic Aspects of Information Theory

Series comments: This online seminar is a follow up of the Dagstuhl Seminar 22301, www.dagstuhl.de/en/program/calendar/semhp/?semnr=22301.