A Practical Guide to Studying Emergent Communication through Grounded Language Games

Understand

The question of how an effective and efficient communication system can emerge in a population of agents that need to solve a particular task attracts more and more attention from researchers in many fields, including artificial intelligence, linguistics and statistical physics.

• A common methodology for studying this question consists of carrying out multi-agent experiments in which a population of agents takes part in a series of scripted and task-oriented communicative interactions, called 'language games'.
• While each individual language game is typically played by two agents in the population, a large series of games allows the population to converge on a shared communication system.
• Setting up an experiment in which a rich system for communicating about the real world emerges is a major enterprise, as it requires a variety of software components for running multi-agent experiments, for interacting with sensors and actuators, for conceptualising and interpreting semantic structures, and for mapping between these semantic structures and linguistic utterances.