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Interactive semantic alignment model: social influence and local transmission bottleneck. (English) Zbl 1419.91572

Summary: We provide a computational model of semantic alignment among communicating agents constrained by social and cognitive pressures. We use our model to analyze the effects of social stratification and a local transmission bottleneck on the coordination of meaning in isolated dyads. The analysis suggests that the traditional approach to learning – understood as inferring prescribed meaning from observations – can be viewed as a special case of semantic alignment, manifesting itself in the behaviour of socially imbalanced dyads put under mild pressure of a local transmission bottleneck. Other parametrizations of the model yield different long-term effects, including lack of convergence or convergence on simple meanings only.

MSC:

91F20 Linguistics
91D99 Mathematical sociology (including anthropology)

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