Agent-based model for the origins of scaling in human language

Background/Introduction: The Zipf’s law establishes that if the words of a (large) text are ordered by decreasing frequency, the frequency versus the rank decreases as a power law with exponent close to -1. Previous work has stressed that this pattern arises from a conflict of interests of the participants of communication: speakers and hearers. • Methods: The challenge here is to define a computational language game on a population of agents, playing games mainly based on a parameter that measures the relative participant’s interests. • Results: Numerical simulations suggest that at critical values of the parameter a human-like vocabulary, exhibiting scaling properties, seems to appear. (corresponding author) e-mail: [email protected]; telephone/fax number: +56 2 2331 1000 [email protected] 1 • Conclusions: The appearance of an intermediate distribution of frequencies at some critical values of the parameter suggests that on a population of artificial agents the emergence of scaling partly arises as a self-organized process only from local interactions between agents.