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Steels, L. (1996) Self-organizing vocabularies. In Christopher G. Langton and Katsunori Shimohara, editors, Artificial Life V, pages 179--184. Nara, Japan.
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Paper at a Glance 

Self­organising vocabularies
Luc Steels
Artificial Intelligence Laboratory
Vrije Universiteit Brussel
Pleinlaan 2, B­1050 Brussels, Belgium
E­mail: steels@arti.vub.ac.be
November 14, 1995
1 Introduction Linguistics has traditionally focused on developing a description of all the possible sentences in a particular language (grammar) and on finding con­ straints that the grammars of all natural languages satisfy (universal gram­ mar). However, a true theory of language should strive for more: It should explain why language has originated in the first place, how language can be learned, why language keeps evolving, and why there are so many diverse languages. The 'artificial life' approach has already shed some light on these issues. Several researchers have carried out experiments to investigate the origin of communication [5], the origin of vocabulary [6], and the growth in complexity of syntax [3]. These researchers assume that genetic evolution is the main driving force towards new structure, coherence, and more com­ plexity. But humans learn the languages present in their environment during their life time. There is no evidence that a particular natural language is innate (although the thesis has been advanced that there is an innate lan­ guage acquisition device [1]). Moreover languages are continuously evolving and expanding and speakers must consequently adapt. This paper applies another mechanism than genetic evolution for struc­ ture formation to the problem of language formation, namely self­organisation. Self­organisation occurs in complex dynamical systems which are coupled in 1 a particular way. Standard examples are the formation of a termite nest [2] or a path in an ant society. This paper focuses on the formation of vocabularies, i.e. a set of couplings between words and meanings. A common vocabulary will be viewed as a self­ organising phenomenon similar to a path in an ant society. Each agent is assumed to create his own vocabulary in a random ...
BibTex
@inproceedings{steels96selfOrganizing,
  author={L. Steels},
  title={Self-organizing vocabularies},
  year={1996},
  pages={179-184},
  address={Nara, Japan},
  editor={Christopher G. Langton and Katsunori Shimohara},
  booktitle={Artificial Life V},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/steels96selfOrganizing.html},
  keywords={self-organization, simulation, evolutionary linguistics, language games, lexicon, agents}
}

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