Abstract
There is growing interest in the language developed by agents interacting in emergent-communication settings. Earlier studies have focused on the agents’ symbol usage, rather than on their representation of visual input. In this paper, we consider the referential games of Lazaridou et al. (2017), and investigate the representations the agents develop during their evolving interaction. We find that the agents establish successful communication by inducing visual representations that almost perfectly align with each other, but, surprisingly, do not capture the conceptual properties of the objects depicted in the input images. We conclude that, if we care about developing language-like communication systems, we must pay more attention to the visual semantics agents associate to the symbols they use.- Anthology ID:
- D18-1119
- Volume:
- Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
- Month:
- October-November
- Year:
- 2018
- Address:
- Brussels, Belgium
- Venue:
- EMNLP
- SIG:
- SIGDAT
- Publisher:
- Association for Computational Linguistics
- Note:
- Pages:
- 981–985
- Language:
- URL:
- https://aclanthology.org/D18-1119
- DOI:
- 10.18653/v1/D18-1119
- Cite (ACL):
- Diane Bouchacourt and Marco Baroni. 2018. How agents see things: On visual representations in an emergent language game. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 981–985, Brussels, Belgium. Association for Computational Linguistics.
- Cite (Informal):
- How agents see things: On visual representations in an emergent language game (Bouchacourt & Baroni, EMNLP 2018)
- PDF:
- https://preview.aclanthology.org/starsem-semeval-split/D18-1119.pdf
- Data
- ImageNet