cs.CL · 2511.19120 Copy arXiv ID · Nov 24, 2025 Save On the Optimality of Kinship Naming: an Information-theoretic Approach Authors: Phong Le , Mees Lindeman , Raquel G. Alhama
Organizations: University of St Andrews · Institute for Logic, Language and Computation; University of Amsterdam.
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 referential game setup from emergent communication, we further show that trade-off optimality is not only theoretically achievable but also emerges empirically in learned communication systems.
Explore similar work May 5, 2026 · Fengyuan Yang, Yongqian Peng, Yuxi Ma +2 Morphology Speech Evaluation
Jun 10, 2026 · Junyi Zhou, Rui Liu, Pengyu Liu +1 Model Complexity Ladder
May 5, 2026 · cs.CL J/K move · Enter open · S save
Fengyuan Yang, Yongqian Peng, Yuxi Ma, Chenheng Xu +1
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining morphemes through compounding or affixation -- has rarely been modeled as a historically situated speaker choice among competing morpheme sequences, leaving unanswered why a language settles on one morpheme combination over other plausible alternatives. We ask whether a trade-off between listener recoverability and speaker production cost can predict attested compositions over contemporaneously available alternatives. Here we show, within the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework (Frank & Goodman, 2012; Goodman & Frank, 2016) using a time-indexed lexicon constructed from Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), that across 4323 naturally occurring English compounds and derivations spanning 1820--2019, attested compositions are systematically ranked above unattested alternatives generated from contemporaneously available morphemes. Models integrating semantic informativeness with production cost outperform semantic-only and cost-only baselines on Mean Reciprocal Rank (MRR) and top-k accuracy (Acc@k), with the advantage of the Pragmatic Speaker model (
S 1 S_1 S 1 ) over the semantic-only baseline growing as the candidate set expands, where meaning alone leaves morphological choice underdetermined. These findings suggest that lexicalization reflects a communicative trade-off between expressiveness and efficiency, extending rational accounts of communication from utterance-level choice to the internal structure of words.