In order to talk about the world, agents need to have a shared lexicon.
The lexicon formation experiments investigate how a shared lexicon can
emerge in a population of agents that initially have no lexicon at
all.
The simplest game that is played by the agents is the naming
game. Two agents are chosen from the population. One agent points to
an object and says a name for this object. The other agent looks in
its lexicon and checks whether it has the same name for the same
object. If so, the game was successful. If not the game is a failure,
but the listening agent remembers the name that was given to the
object.
Agents prefer to use the most successful names, and discard the
unsuccessful ones. After a while a coherent and successful lexicon
emerges.
A number of interesting variations on the basic game have been
tried out. One of these entailed the developing of a more abstract
spatial vocabulary with which the spatial relations between different
objects could be expressed. In another experiment agents were given
spatial positions and the probability of interaction between two
agents depended on the distance between them. In this experiment,
depending on the strength of the coupling between the agents
monolingual, bilingual or multilingual agents emerged.
Read more about the experiments on the emergence of shared meanings
and a shared lexicon: Steels, L. and Kaplan, F. and McIntyre, A. and
Van Looveren, J.
Crucial factors in the origins of word-meaning. In: Wray, A.,
et.al. (eds.) The Transition to Language. Oxford University
Press. Oxford, 2002
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