Since 1995 members of the AI Lab have worked on the
problem of the origins of language. The basic idea behind this work
is that a community of language users (further called agents) can be
viewed as a complex adaptive system which collectively solves the
problem of developing a shared communication system. To do so, the
community must reach an agreement on a repertoire of forms (a sound
system in the case of spoken language), a repertoire of meanings (the
conceptualisations of reality), and a repertoire of form-meaning
pairs (the lexicon and grammar).
Although communication is not a general computational problem it is
nevertheless a problem of great interest. First of all there is a
strong interest from a scientific point of view. Finding the key how
communication systems of the complexity of human natural languages
emerge may help to solve the problem how human language itself may
have originated and evolved. This longstanding fascinating question
is receiving increasing attention lately, but only clear scientific
models that explain how language evolved (as opposed to enumerating
conditions why language evolved) can be expected to steer us away from
the many speculations that made the field suspect for a long time. By
clear scientific models we mean that the cognitive structures and
interaction behaviors of each agent are specified and that it is shown
how they collectively lead to a language.
Second, there is an interest because of possible applications. On
the one hand, autonomous artificial agents which need to coordinate
their activity in open-ended environments could make use of these
mechanisms to develop and continuously adapt their communication
systems. On the other hand, understanding how language develops and
evolves is probably our only hope to ever get to technological
artefacts that exhibit human-level language understanding and
production. Human languages are constantly changing and differ
significantly from one speaker to the next and from one context to the
next. So, we need language technologies which exhibit the same
adaptivity as humans.
The experiments conducted so far have always the same form: (1)
They involve a population of (artificial) agents, possibly robots. (2) The agents engage in interactions
situated in a specific environment. Such an interaction is called a game. (3) Each agent has a sensori-motor
apparatus, a cognitive architecture, and a script determining how it
interacts with others. (4) There is an environment (possibly the real
world) which consists of situations that are ideally open-ended.
Different parts of language are being investigated within this
framework:
Read more about our approach: Luc Steels,
The puzzle of language evolution (pdf)
Kognitionswissenschaft, 8(4), 1999.
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