Emergent Linguistic Phenomena in Multi-Agent Communication Games

Laura Harding Graesser, Kyunghyun Cho, Douwe Kiela

Abstract
We describe a multi-agent communication framework for examining high-level linguistic phenomena at the community-level. We demonstrate that complex linguistic behavior observed in natural language can be reproduced in this simple setting: i) the outcome of contact between communities is a function of inter- and intra-group connectivity; ii) linguistic contact either converges to the majority protocol, or in balanced cases leads to novel creole languages of lower complexity; and iii) a linguistic continuum emerges where neighboring languages are more mutually intelligible than farther removed languages. We conclude that at least some of the intricate properties of language evolution need not depend on complex evolved linguistic capabilities, but can emerge from simple social exchanges between perceptually-enabled agents playing communication games.
Anthology ID:
D19-1384
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2019
Address:
Hong Kong, China
Editors:
Kentaro Inui, Jing Jiang, Vincent Ng, Xiaojun Wan
Venues:
EMNLP | IJCNLP
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3700–3710
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/D19-1384
DOI:
10.18653/v1/D19-1384
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Laura Harding Graesser, Kyunghyun Cho, and Douwe Kiela. 2019. Emergent Linguistic Phenomena in Multi-Agent Communication Games. In Proceedings of the 2019 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing and the 9th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (EMNLP-IJCNLP), pages 3700–3710, Hong Kong, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Emergent Linguistic Phenomena in Multi-Agent Communication Games (Harding Graesser et al., EMNLP-IJCNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/D19-1384.pdf
Code
 lgraesser/MultimodalGame
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