Miss Tools and Mr Fruit: Emergent Communication in Agents Learning about Object Affordances

Diane Bouchacourt, Marco Baroni


Abstract
Recent research studies communication emergence in communities of deep network agents assigned a joint task, hoping to gain insights on human language evolution. We propose here a new task capturing crucial aspects of the human environment, such as natural object affordances, and of human conversation, such as full symmetry among the participants. By conducting a thorough pragmatic and semantic analysis of the emergent protocol, we show that the agents solve the shared task through genuine bilateral, referential communication. However, the agents develop multiple idiolects, which makes us conclude that full symmetry is not a sufficient condition for a common language to emerge.
Anthology ID:
P19-1380
Volume:
Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Anna Korhonen, David Traum, Lluís Màrquez
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3909–3918
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1380
DOI:
10.18653/v1/P19-1380
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Diane Bouchacourt and Marco Baroni. 2019. Miss Tools and Mr Fruit: Emergent Communication in Agents Learning about Object Affordances. In Proceedings of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 3909–3918, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Miss Tools and Mr Fruit: Emergent Communication in Agents Learning about Object Affordances (Bouchacourt & Baroni, ACL 2019)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/P19-1380.pdf
Supplementary:
 P19-1380.Supplementary.zip