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        <title>Emergent Communication in Continuous Worlds: Self-Organisation of Conceptually Grounded Vocabularies at Scale</title>
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    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Jérôme</namePart>
        <namePart type="family">Botoko Ekila</namePart>
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        <namePart type="given">Jens</namePart>
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    <name type="personal">
        <namePart type="given">Katrien</namePart>
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    <name type="personal">
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    <abstract>This paper introduces a general methodology through which a population of autonomous agents can converge on a linguistic convention that enables them to refer to arbitrary entities in their environment. The linguistic convention emerges in a decentralised manner through local communicative interactions between pairs of agents drawn from the population. The emergent convention consists of associations between symbolic labels (word forms) and subsymbolic concept representations (word meanings) that are grounded in a continuous feature space. We confirm the generality and scalability of the method through its evaluation on a wide and diverse selection of 37 publicly available datasets. Through a range of experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of the method against perceptual variation, including in heteromorphic populations, as well as the ability of the emergent conventions to self-adapt to changes in the environment.</abstract>
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    <identifier type="doi">10.1162/tacl.a.799</identifier>
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        <date>2026</date>
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            <start>2234</start>
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%0 Journal Article
%T Emergent Communication in Continuous Worlds: Self-Organisation of Conceptually Grounded Vocabularies at Scale
%A Botoko Ekila, Jérôme
%A Verheyen, Lara
%A Nevens, Jens
%A Beuls, Katrien
%A Van Eecke, Paul
%J Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics
%D 2026
%V 14
%I MIT Press
%C Cambridge, MA
%F botoko-ekila-etal-2026-emergent
%X This paper introduces a general methodology through which a population of autonomous agents can converge on a linguistic convention that enables them to refer to arbitrary entities in their environment. The linguistic convention emerges in a decentralised manner through local communicative interactions between pairs of agents drawn from the population. The emergent convention consists of associations between symbolic labels (word forms) and subsymbolic concept representations (word meanings) that are grounded in a continuous feature space. We confirm the generality and scalability of the method through its evaluation on a wide and diverse selection of 37 publicly available datasets. Through a range of experiments, we demonstrate the robustness of the method against perceptual variation, including in heteromorphic populations, as well as the ability of the emergent conventions to self-adapt to changes in the environment.
%R 10.1162/tacl.a.799
%U https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.101/
%U https://doi.org/10.1162/tacl.a.799
%P 2234-2257

Markdown (Informal)

[Emergent Communication in Continuous Worlds: Self-Organisation of Conceptually Grounded Vocabularies at Scale](https://aclanthology.org/2026.tacl-1.101/) (Botoko Ekila et al., TACL 2026)

• Emergent Communication in Continuous Worlds: Self-Organisation of Conceptually Grounded Vocabularies at Scale (Botoko Ekila et al., TACL 2026)

ACL

• Jérôme Botoko Ekila, Lara Verheyen, Jens Nevens, Katrien Beuls, and Paul Van Eecke. 2026. Emergent Communication in Continuous Worlds: Self-Organisation of Conceptually Grounded Vocabularies at Scale. Transactions of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 14:2234–2257.