Jon Carr (University of Edinburgh)<\/em><\/p>\n Tuesday 31 October 2017, 11:00\u201312:30 Languages are shaped by competing pressures from learning and communication. Learning favours simple languages, while communication favours informative ones, giving rise to the simplicity\u2013informativeness tradeoff.<\/p>\n In this talk I will pay special attention to the simplicity part of this tradeoff. I argue that learning is best viewed as a model selection problem in which a simplicity prior plays an essential role in allowing agents to reason about unseen items and to avoid overfitting noise in the data stream.<\/p>\n I show that simple, structured, learnable concepts can emerge from this very general principle in a Bayesian iterated learning model. And I show that an experimental analogue of this model returns strikingly similar results.<\/p>\n Finally, I consider another hypothesis that could explain the results \u2013 that learners have a prior bias for informativeness \u2013 and I show why this explanation is unlikely.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Simplicity priors and conceptual structure Jon Carr (University of Edinburgh) Tuesday 31 October 2017, 11:00\u201312:30 G32, 7 George Square Languages are shaped by competing pressures from learning and communication. Learning favours simple languages, while communication favours informative ones, giving rise to the simplicity\u2013informativeness tradeoff. In this talk I will pay special attention to the simplicity … Continue reading 31 October: Jon Carr<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2713","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-talks"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2713","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/7"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2713"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2713\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2714,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2713\/revisions\/2714"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2713"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2713"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cle.ppls.ed.ac.uk\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2713"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nG32, 7 George Square<\/p>\n