Least effort and the origins of scaling in human language

By R. Ferrer i Cancho, R. V. Solé. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2003

572 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Subfields: Cultural Studies, Molecular Biology, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/3a97a438f900fa14d017e949b1fa9e871422e0c3

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Citations in the corpus

The communicative function of ambiguity in language. (2011, unknown): “…back into favor to explain both the online behavior of language users (e.g. Genzel & Charniak, 2002; Aylett & Turk, 2004; Jaeger, 2006; Levy & Jaeger, 2007, i.a.) and the structure of languages themselves (e.g. Ferrer i Cancho & Sol´e, 2003; Ferrer i Cancho, 2006; Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2011).”
Languages cool as they expand: Allometric scaling and the decreasing need for new words (2012, background): “The Zipf law can be derived through the “principle of least effort,” which minimizes the communication noise between speakers (writers) and listeners (readers) [14].”
Usage‐Based Language: Investigating the Latent Structures That Underpin Acquisition (2013, background): “…suspect them to be fundamental, and are beginning to investigate how they might underlie language processing, learnability, acquisition, usage and change (Beckner et al., 2009; Ellis & Larsen-Freeman, 2009b; Ferrer i Cancho & Solé, 2001, 2003; Ferrer i Cancho et al., 2004; Solé et al., 2010).”
Using coevolutionary and complexity theories to improve IS alignment: a multi-level approach (2006, unknown): “The least-effort rule leads to efficient use of language words, as Zipf (1949) theorized and as recently confirmed by Ferrer i Cancho and Sole´ (2003).”
The Matthew effect in empirical data (2014, background): “The original proposal made by Zipf, on the other hand, was that there is tension between the efforts of the speaker and the listener, and it has been shown by means of mathematical modelling that this may indeed explain the origins of scaling in the usage of words [135].”
The Dynamics of Second Language Emergence: Cycles of Language Use, Language Change, and Language Acquisition (2008, background): “As these forces play out in symbolic usage, languages evolve to have scaling properties that follow Zipf’s (1935) law (Ferrer i Cancho & Solé, 2003).”
The complex dynamics of collaborative tagging (2007, methodology): “A large amount of work expl oring the structural properties of nature language networks finds similar results [6].”
Across-Language Perspective on Speech Information Rate (2011, background): “More recently, several theoretical models have been proposed to account for this regularity and to reanalyze Zipf’s assumption in terms of emergent properties (e.g. Ferrer i Cancho 2005, Ferrer i Cancho & Solé 2003, Kuperman et al. 2008).”
Statistical Measures for Usage‐Based Linguistics (2015, background): “Subsequent research has shown that many language events (e.g., frequencies of phoneme and letter strings, of words, of grammatical constructs, of formulaic phrases, etc.) across scales of analysis follow this law (Ferrer i Cancho & Solé, 2001, 2003).”
Zipf’s word frequency law in natural language: A critical review and future directions (2014, background): “…scales (Kawamura & Hatano, 2002), semantic organization (Guiraud, 1968; D. Manin, 2008), communicative optimization (Ferrer i Cancho, 2005a, b; Ferrer i Cancho & Solé, 2003; Mandelbrot, 1962; Salge, Ay, Polani, & Prokopenko, 2013; Zipf, 1936, 1949), random division of elements into groups…”
Towards the Quantification of the Semantic Information Encoded in Written Language (2009, background): “In recent years the use of tools drawn from statistical physics has quantitatively revealed rich linguistic structures at many scales, ranging from the domain of syntax to the organisation of whole lexicons and literary corpora [5, 4, 6, 9, 10, 16, 24, 25].”
Conflict monitoring and decision making: Reconciling two perspectives on anterior cingulate function (2007, methodology): “For example, Rosch (1999) attributed the categorical structure of human semantic memory to a principle of “cognitive economy,” and Zipf (1949) applied a similar interpretation to regularities in the frequency distributions of words (see also Ferrer i Cancho & Sole, 2003).”