Noisy Population Dynamics Lead to Efficiently Compressed Semantic Systems

Human languages have been argued to support efficient communication. In particular, cross-linguistic evidence suggests that semantic category systems optimally balance cognitive cost with communicative accuracy. In this paper, we show that very general population dynamics of signaling games lead to the emergence of information-theoretically efficient meaning systems. In numerical simulations, we observe that noisy perception of meaning can result in emergent meaning systems with higher efficiency.