Comment des robots peuvent-ils créer leur propre langue ?
(Presentation Video, Narration : Luc Steels)
The Talking Heads experiment,
developed with Luc Steels and collaborators in Sony CSL Paris and the
VUB AI lab in Brussels, studied the evolution of a shared lexicon
in a population of embodied software agents. The agents developed their
vocabulary by observing a scene through digital cameras and
communicating about what they habe
seen together. To add an extra level of complexity to their task,
agents were able to move freely between different computer
installations
located in different parts of the world. Members of the public were
able to influence the course of the experiment by logging on to the
Talking Heads website to create and teach their own agents.
Steels,
L. and Kaplan, F. (2002) Bootstrapping grounded word semantics. In
Briscoe,T. Linguistic evolution through language acquisition: formal
and computational models, p. 53-73, Cambdrige University Press,
Cambridge, UK. [pdf]
The paper reports on experiments with a population of visually grounded robotic agents capable of bootstrapping their own ontology and shared lexicon without prior design nor other forms of human intervention. The agents do so while playing a particular language game called the guessing game. We show that synonymy and ambiguity arise as emergent properties in the lexicon, due to the situated grounded character of the agent-environment interaction, but that there are also tendencies to dampen them so as to make the language more coherent and thus more optimal from the viewpoints of communicative success, cognitive complexity, and learnability.
Kaplan, F. (2001), La naissance d’une langue chez les robots, Hermès Science Publications [more info][amazon]
Steels, L. (1999) The Talking Heads Experiment Volume 1. Words and Meaning; Laboratorium, Antwerpen. Limited Pre-edition.
)