James Winters, who is in the first year of his PhD with us, will be giving a talk: “It’s all just noise: Redundancy as a lower-bound on the emergence of systematicity”, Tuesday 14th May, 11am, DSB 1.17. Abstract below.

For this talk I will discuss the concept of redundancy and how it relates to the emergence of systematicity. First of all, I will provide a brief overview on a particular definition of redundancy as duplication of information in certain contexts, followed by a typology of the types of redundancy we observe in language. Next, I will discuss how context governs the conditions in which redundancy is promoted, and how only in conditions that favour a specific type of redundancy do we get systematicity. In particular, this relates to the role of redundancy as a robustness-enhancing device in the face of noise and unpredictability during communication. Lastly, I will discuss experimental work I’ve been doing that tests these assumptions in an Iterated Learning/Communication game set up.

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