Iterated learning and grounding: from holistic to compositional languages

This paper presents a new computational model for studying the origins and evolution of compositional languages grounded through the interaction between agents and their environment. The model is based on previous work on adaptive grounding of lexicons and the iterated learning model. Although the model is still in a developmental phase, the first results show that a compositional language can emerge in which the structure reflects regularities present in the population's environment

Where creativity comes from: the social spaces of embodied minds

This paper explores creative design, social interaction and perception. It proposes that creativity at a social level is not a result of many individuals trying to be creative at a personal level, but occurs naturally in the social interaction between comparatively simple minds embodied in a complex world. Particle swarm algorithms can model group interaction in shared spaces, but design space is not necessarily one pre-defined space of set parameters on which everyone can agree, as individual minds are very different. A computational model is proposed that allows a similar swarm to occur between spaces of different description and even dimensionality. This paper explores creative design, social interaction and perception. It proposes that creativity at a social level is not a result of many individuals trying to be creative at a personal level, but occurs naturally in the social interaction between comparatively simple minds embodied in a complex world. Particle swarm algorithms can model group interaction in shared spaces, but design space is not necessarily one pre-defined space of set parameters on which everyone can agree, as individual minds are very different. A computational model is proposed that allows a similar swarm to occur between spaces of different description and even dimensionality

A Practical Guide to Studying Emergent Communication through Grounded Language Games

The question of how an effective and efficient communication system can emerge in a population of agents that need to solve a particular task attracts more and more attention from researchers in many fields, including artificial intelligence, linguistics and statistical physics. A common methodology for studying this question consists of carrying out multi-agent experiments in which a population of agents takes part in a series of scripted and task-oriented communicative interactions, called 'language games'. While each individual language game is typically played by two agents in the population, a large series of games allows the population to converge on a shared communication system. Setting up an experiment in which a rich system for communicating about the real world emerges is a major enterprise, as it requires a variety of software components for running multi-agent experiments, for interacting with sensors and actuators, for conceptualising and interpreting semantic structures, and for mapping between these semantic structures and linguistic utterances. The aim of this paper is twofold. On the one hand, it introduces a high-level robot interface that extends the Babel software system, presenting for the first time a toolkit that provides flexible modules for dealing with each subtask involved in running advanced grounded language game experiments. On the other hand, it provides a practical guide to using the toolkit for implementing such experiments, taking a grounded colour naming game experiment as a didactic example.Comment: This paper was officially published at the 'Language Learning for Artificial Agents (L2A2) Symposium' of the 2019 Artificial Intelligence and Simulation of Behaviour (AISB) Conventio

Semantic Flexibility and Grounded Language Learning

International audienceWe explore the way that the flexibility inherent in the lexicon might be incorporated into the process by which an environmentally grounded artificial agent-a robot-acquires language. We take flexibility to indicate not only many-to-many mappings between words and extensions, but also the way that word meaning is specified in the context of a particular situation in the world. Our hypothesis is that embodiment and embededness are necessary conditions for the development of semantic representations that exhibit this flexibility. We examine this hypothesis by first very briefly reviewing work to date in the domain of grounded language learning, and then proposing two research objectives: 1) the incorporation of high-dimensional semantic representations that permit context-specific projections, and 2) an exploration of ways in which non-humanoid robots might exhibit language-learning capacities. We suggest that the experimental programme implicated by this theoretical investigation could be situated broadly within the enactivist paradigm, which approaches cognition from the perspective of agents emerging in the course of dynamic entanglements within an environment

Informação como ação significativa em processos semióticos emergentes baseados em Multiagente

O objetivo deste capítulo é analisar o conceito de informação como uma ação significativa em sistemas complexos adaptativos. A comunicação e a linguagem são vistas como sistemas complexos por Maturana & Varela (1994), cuja principal característica é a auto-organização. Para estes autores, a comunicação é literalmente o conjunto de ações comuns em um coletivo de agentes. Sob uma vertente enativa semiótica, decidimos então: 1. Replicar resultados de convergência léxica e ampliar os resultados obtidos por Loula et al. (2003) e Loula (2004); 2. Para isso, foi concebido e implementado o SIMPS - Simulador de Processos Semióticos; e 3. Analisar o conceito de informação como ação significativa, isto é, como ações envolvidas em processos semióticos, cujos significados se encontram nos usos coletivos das palavras e expressões de jogos de linguagem. Apesar de entendermos que nem toda informação é adaptativa, buscamos gerar informações passíveis de trazer vantagens adaptativas para grupos de agentes. Nosso modelo de simulação aponta, dentre outros resultados, que informações falsas podem ser mais prejudiciais do que informação alguma

Grounding semantics in robots for Visual Question Answering

In this thesis I describe an operational implementation of an object detection and description system that incorporates in an end-to-end Visual Question Answering system and evaluated it on two visual question answering datasets for compositional language and elementary visual reasoning

Complex systems approach to natural language

The review summarizes the main methodological concepts used in studying natural language from the perspective of complexity science and documents their applicability in identifying both universal and system-specific features of language in its written representation. Three main complexity-related research trends in quantitative linguistics are covered. The first part addresses the issue of word frequencies in texts and demonstrates that taking punctuation into consideration restores scaling whose violation in the Zipf's law is often observed for the most frequent words. The second part introduces methods inspired by time series analysis, used in studying various kinds of correlations in written texts. The related time series are generated on the basis of text partition into sentences or into phrases between consecutive punctuation marks. It turns out that these series develop features often found in signals generated by complex systems, like long-range correlations or (multi)fractal structures. Moreover, it appears that the distances between punctuation marks comply with the discrete variant of the Weibull distribution. In the third part, the application of the network formalism to natural language is reviewed, particularly in the context of the so-called word-adjacency networks. Parameters characterizing topology of such networks can be used for classification of texts, for example, from a stylometric perspective. Network approach can also be applied to represent the organization of word associations. Structure of word-association networks turns out to be significantly different from that observed in random networks, revealing genuine properties of language. Finally, punctuation seems to have a significant impact not only on the language's information-carrying ability but also on its key statistical properties, hence it is recommended to consider punctuation marks on a par with words.Comment: 113 pages, 49 figure

Language strategies for the domain of colour

This book presents a major leap forward in the understanding of colour by showing how richer descriptions of colour samples can be operationalized in agent-based models. Four different language strategies are explored: the basic colour strategy, the graded membership strategy, the category combination strategy and the basic modification strategy. These strategies are firmly rooted in empirical observations in natural languages, with a focus on compositionality at both the syntactic and semantic level. Through a series of in-depth experiments, this book discerns the impact of the environment, language and embodiment on the formation of basic colour systems. Finally, the experiments demonstrate how language users can invent their own language strategies of increasing complexity by combining primitive cognitive operators, and how these strategies can be aligned between language users through linguistic interactions