Complexity Science Seminar Series - Abstracts
Title:
Language Evolution on Social Networks
Presenter:
Dr. Samarth Swarup, Network Dynamics and Simulation Science Laboratory, VBI, Virginia Tech
Date and Time: Tuesday, January 30th, 2009 3:30-4:30pm
Abstract:
Recently the evolution of language has emerged as a significant area of interdisciplinary inquiry, bringing together linguists, psychologists, and social scientists with physicists and computer scientists. This has brought the tools of evolutionary mathematics and simulation science to questions of the evolutionary emergence of natural human (and animal) communications, and has also instigated research into how autonomous agents might constructively develop their own languages independently of human designers. In this talk I will describe some of my own work in each of these areas, focusing on questions about the role of social networks in language emergence and spread. In particular, I will describe how a variant of preferential attachment can be viewed as an evolutionary process, and how this leads to a model that induces rapid convergence to a "good" language in a population of agents. I will also describe a simulation of an "indegree-biased voter model" for the spread of linguistic features through a population. These are both recent results, and there is a lot of work still to be done in the analysis and understanding of these models and phenomena, and I welcome all feedback and suggestions.
Seminar Location: The seminars are held at:
Virginia Tech, Corporate Research Center
1880 Pratt Drive, Building XV
Seminar Room, First Floor
Directions: Map (PDF)
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