Homonyms, context, and the emergence of language in a population of communicating agents

What is it about?

We simulate the emergence of language in a population of communicating agents. Our study demonstrates that context, i.e. additional information transmitted between agents, strongly stabilizes homonyms. Such a result can explain the observed abundance and stability of homonyms in natural languages. Our research shows that the emerging language may contain nonsymmetrical homonyms, but only when there is a strong reinforcement of the successful communication between agents.

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Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Photo by Christopher Gower on Unsplash

Why is it important?

A valuable merit of our study is its interdisciplinarity: we associate the stability of homonyms with the asymptotic solution of certain nonlinear urn models. The solutions corresponding to nonsymmetric homonyms were quite surprising. Perhaps they are related to the so-called polarized homonyms.