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Steels, L. and Kaplan, F. (1998) Stochasticity as a source of innovation in language games. In C. Adami and R. Belew and H. Kitano and C. Taylor, editors, Artificial Life VI. Los Angeles: MIT Press.
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Paper at a Glance 

Stochasticity as a Source of Innovation in Language Games
Luc Steels (1,2) and Fr'ed'eric Kaplan (1,3)
(1) Sony CSL ­ Paris ­ 6 Rue Amyot, 75005 Paris
(2) VUB AI Lab ­ Brussels
(3) LIP6 ­ UPMC ­ 4, Place Jussieu F­75252 Paris
E­mail: steels@arti.vub.ac.be
Abstract Recent work on viewing language as a complex adaptive system has shown that self­organisation can explain how a group of distributed agents can reach a coherent set of linguistic conventions and how such a set can be preserved from one genera­ tion to the next based on cultural transmission. The paper continues these investigations by exploring the presence of stochasticity in the various aspects of lexical communication: stochasticity in the non­ linguistic communication constraining meaning, the transmission of the message, and the retrieval from memory. We show that there is an upperbound on the amount of stochasticity which can be tol­ erated and that stochasticity causes and maintains language variation. Results are based on the fur­ ther exploration of a minimal computational model of language interaction in a group of distributed agents, called the naming game.
Keywords: origins of language, evolution of language, self­organization.
1 Introduction Exciting recent research in the origins and evolution of language (see overviews in [Hurford et al., 1998] and [Steels, 1997c]) is showing that when language is viewed as a complex adaptive system, it becomes possible to understand how a set of distributed agents is capable to reach a shared set of conventions, even if there is no global controlling agency or prior design. The main mechanism responsible for the emergence of coherence is self­organisation: A positive feedback loop causes some naturally occurring variation to propagate and eventu­ ally dominate the population. This is similar to how a product comes to dominate a market in increasing­ returns economics [Arthur, 1996], or how a group of so­ cial insects like an ant society can form a ...
BibTex
@inproceedings{steels98stochasticityAs,
  author={L. Steels and F. Kaplan},
  title={Stochasticity as a source of innovation in language games},
  year={1998},
  address={Los Angeles},
  editor={C. Adami and R. Belew and H. Kitano and C. Taylor},
  publisher={MIT Press},
  booktitle={Artificial Life VI},
  url={http://www.isrl.uiuc.edu/~amag/langev/paper/steels98stochasticityAs.html},
  keywords={language games, stochasticity, innovation,evolutionary linguistics}
}

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