Theoretical Tools in Modeling Communication and Language Dynamics

Statistical physics has proven to be a very fruitful framework to describe phenomena outside the realm of traditional physics. In social phenomena, the basic constituents are not particles but humans and every individual interacts with a limited number of peers, usually negligible compared to the total number of people in the system. In spite of that, human societies are characterized by stunning global regularities that naturally call for a statistical physics approach to social behavior, i.e., the attempt to understand regularities at large scale as collective effects of the interaction among single individuals, considered as relatively simple entities. This is the paradigm of Complex Systems: an assembly of many interacting (and simple) units whose collective behavior is not trivially deducible from the knowledge of the rules governing their mutual interactions. In this chapter we review the main theoretical concepts and tools that physics can borrow to socially-motivated problems. Despite their apparent diversity, most research lines in social dynamics are actually closely connected from the point of view of both the methodologies employed and, more importantly, of the general phenomenological questions, e.g., what are the fundamental interaction mechanisms leading to the emergence of consensus on an issue, a shared culture, a common language or a collective motion? © 2010 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.