Bootstrapping grounded word semantics

Abstract

The paper reports on experiments with a population of visually grounded robotic agents capable of bootstrapping their own ontology and 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 ambiguity arise as emergent properties in the lexicon, due to the situated grounded character of the agent–environment interaction, but that there are also tendencies to dampen them so as to make the language more coherent and thus more optimal from the viewpoints of communicative success, cognitive complexity, and learnability.