On the Optimality of Kinship Naming: an Information-theoretic Approach
Quick summary
arXiv:2511.19120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The structure of naming systems in natural languages hinges on a trade-off between high informativeness and low complexity. Focusing on the domain of kinship naming, we analyze such trade-off while addressing simplifying assumptions of prior work, namely: (i) universal communicative need across languages, and (ii) optimal listeners. To that aim, we collect data from four different languages, and analyze how different communicative needs and variations in the listener model influence the informativeness--complexity trade-off. Adopting a
Key takeaways
- arXiv:2511.19120v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The structure of naming systems in natural languages hinges on a trade-off between high informativeness and low complexity.
- Focusing on the domain of kinship naming, we analyze such trade-off while addressing simplifying assumptions of prior work, namely: (i) universal communicative need across languages, and (ii) optimal listeners.
- To that aim, we collect data from four different languages, and analyze how different communicative needs and variations in the listener model influence the informativeness--complexity trade-off.
Why it matters
This model development creates a new option for users and a new testing obligation for developers. A fixed evaluation set comparing quality, cost and failure behavior is more useful than launch claims.
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