The paper reports on experiments in which autonomous visually grounded agents bootstrap an ontology and a shared lexicon without prior design nor other forms of human intervention. The agents do so while playing a particular language game called the guessing game. We show that synonymy and polysemy arise as emergent properties in the language but also that there are tendencies to dampen it so as to make the language more coherent and thus more optimal from the viewpoints of communicative success, cognitive complexity, and learnability.

Trabajo presentado a la 16th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ijcai) celebrada en Estocolmo (Suecia) del 31 de julio al 6 de agosto de 1999.

This research was conducted at the Sony Computer Science Laboratory.

Peer reviewed