Recommendations for Systematic Research on Emergent Language

Understand

Emergent language is unique among fields within the discipline of machine learning for its open-endedness, not obviously presenting well-defined problems to be solved.

• As a result, the current research in the field has largely been exploratory: focusing on establishing new problems, techniques, and phenomena.
• Yet after these problems have been established, subsequent progress requires research which can measurably demonstrate how it improves on prior approaches.
• This type of research is what we call systematic research; in this paper, we illustrate this mode of research specifically for emergent language.