arXiv：cs.CL· Fabio De Ponte, Eloise Gaines-White, Conor Houghton, Seth Bullock·· 6 小时前AI 评分29
频率结构化的意义空间中语言组合性的演化
Evolving language compositionality in a frequency-structured meaning space
AI 导读
研究用迭代学习模型发现，高频意义能摆脱低频率意义所遵循的语法约束，与自然语言观察一致；但当频率结构施加于意义的组成部分而非完整意义向量时，语言无法跨代传递，即便最高频元素被可靠学会。结果表明，频率只有在定义于学习者可整体习得的形式-意义单元上时才能塑造涌现的语言结构。
正文
Abstract:The iterated learning model was introduced to investigate language evolution: the way in which the characteristic properties of human languages have been shaped, at least partly, by repeated transmission from one language user to another. The key finding is that language compositionality can arise spontaneously as a consequence of language being passed repeatedly through a language learning bottleneck. Here we explore how changing the frequency of different meanings, so that some meanings occur much more frequently than others, affects the character of its compositionality. We find that, as observed in natural languages, high-frequency meanings can escape the pressure to conform to the grammar that characterizes lower-frequency meanings. However, when the frequency structure is instead imposed on parts rather than on whole meaning vectors, the language fails to transmit across generations. This occurs despite the fact that the most frequent elements are reliably learned. These results suggest that frequency can shape emergent linguistic structure only when the frequency distribution is defined over form-meaning units that learners can acquire holistically. When frequency is instead distributed over smaller units, it fails to support the relational structure required for compositional generalisation, thereby preventing stable language transmission.
| Comments: | 17 pages, 4 figures (plus 2 figures in appendix), published in the proceedings of Wivace 2026 (this https URL) |
| Subjects: | Computation and Language (cs.CL) |
| Cite as: | arXiv:2607.29642 [cs.CL] |
| (or arXiv:2607.29642v2 [cs.CL] for this version) | |
| https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.29642 arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite |
Submission history
From: Fabio De Ponte [view email]
[v1]
Fri, 31 Jul 2026 17:18:57 UTC (215 KB)
[v2]
Tue, 6 Oct 2026 17:51:04 UTC (530 KB)
来源：arXiv：cs.CL · arxiv.org