The evolution of a lexicon and meaning in robotic agents through self-organization

Abstract

This paper discusses interdisciplinary experiments, combining robotics and evolutionary computational linguistics. The goal of the experiments is to investigate if robotic agents can originate a language, in particular a lexicon. In the experiments two robots engage in a series of so-called language games. Starting from the assumption that the robots know how to communicate and are able to detect some sensory information from the environment, the agents ground conceptual meaning and develop a lexicon. The experiments show that the robots are able to form a shared communication system. The paper investigates the influence of using non-linguistic information in the formation of the lexicon, which takes the form of pointing (1) to indicate the topic of the language game, and (2) to give feedback on the outcome of the game.