Internal and external pressures on language emergence: least effort, object constancy and frequency

Understand

In previous work, artificial agents were shown to achieve almost perfect accuracy in referential games where they have to communicate to identify images.

• Nevertheless, the resulting communication protocols rarely display salient features of natural languages, such as compositionality.
• In this paper, we propose some realistic sources of pressure on communication that avert this outcome.
• More specifically, we formalise the principle of least effort through an auxiliary objective.