Are you interested in word lengths and natural language’s efficiency? If yes, our new #EMNLP2023 paper has everything you need: drama, suspense, a new derivation of Zipf’s law, an update to Piantadosi et al’s classic word length paper, transformers... 🧵 arxiv.org/abs/2312.03897
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Zipf (1949) argued that lexicons are optimised for communication: They minimise some cost (or effort) function. We formalise this as the lexicalization problem! Optimal lexicons are the solution to an optimisation problem.