# Semantic categories of artifacts and animals reflect efficient coding

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/1905.04562 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.04562/

## Key facts

- Cited by 13 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 11 May 2019.

## Built on by (most cited first, 13 of 13)

- [From Tokens to Thoughts: How LLMs and Humans Trade Compression for Meaning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2505.17117/) (2025)
- [Conceptual similarity and communicative need shape colexification: an experimental study](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.11024/) (2021)
- [Cultural evolution via iterated learning and communication explains efficient color naming systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.10154/) (2023)
- [Towards Human-Agent Communication via the Information Bottleneck Principle](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2207.00088/) (2022)
- [An Information Bottleneck Characterization of the Understanding-Workload Tradeoff](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.07802/) (2023)
- [Evolution and compression in LLMs: On the emergence of human-aligned categorization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.08093/) (2025)
- [Systematicity between Forms and Meanings across Languages Supports Efficient Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.17181/) (2026)
- [Cognitive and Cultural Topology of Linguistic Categories:A Semantic-Pragmatic Metric Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.06876/) (2021)
- [On the Optimality of Kinship Naming: an Information-theoretic Approach](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.19120/) (2025)
- [On convexity and efficiency in semantic systems](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.08238/) (2026)
- [Agent-based imitation dynamics can yield efficiently compressed population-level vocabularies](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.15903/) (2026)
- [Compositionality and the lexicon in evolutionary semantics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2606.27228/) (2026)
- [Where Should Language Sit in a Multimodal Model? Lessons from What Language Does to Human Perception and Cognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.07474/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

It has been argued that semantic categories across languages reflect pressure for efficient communication. Recently, this idea has been cast in terms of a general information-theoretic principle of efficiency, the Information Bottleneck (IB) principle, and it has been shown that this principle accounts for the emergence and evolution of named color categories across languages, including soft structure and patterns of inconsistent naming. However, it is not yet clear to what extent this account generalizes to semantic domains other than color. Here we show that it generalizes to two qualitatively different semantic domains: names for containers, and for animals. First, we show that container naming in Dutch and French is near-optimal in the IB sense, and that IB broadly accounts for soft categories and inconsistent naming patterns in both languages. Second, we show that a hierarchy of animal categories derived from IB captures cross-linguistic tendencies in the growth of animal taxonomies. Taken together, these findings suggest that fundamental information-theoretic principles of efficient coding may shape semantic categories across languages and across domains.