On the Correspondence between Compositionality and Imitation in Emergent Neural Communication

Emily Cheng, Mathieu Rita, Thierry Poibeau


Abstract
Compositionality is a hallmark of human language that not only enables linguistic generalization, but also potentially facilitates acquisition. When simulating language emergence with neural networks, compositionality has been shown to improve communication performance; however, its impact on imitation learning has yet to be investigated. Our work explores the link between compositionality and imitation in a Lewis game played by deep neural agents. Our contributions are twofold: first, we show that the learning algorithm used to imitate is crucial: supervised learning tends to produce more average languages, while reinforcement learning introduces a selection pressure toward more compositional languages. Second, our study reveals that compositional languages are easier to imitate, which may induce the pressure toward compositional languages in RL imitation settings.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.787
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12432–12447
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.787
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.787
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emily Cheng, Mathieu Rita, and Thierry Poibeau. 2023. On the Correspondence between Compositionality and Imitation in Emergent Neural Communication. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 12432–12447, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
On the Correspondence between Compositionality and Imitation in Emergent Neural Communication (Cheng et al., Findings 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.787.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.787.mp4