An agent-based model of the emergence and evolution of a language system for boolean coordination
Authored by Josefina Sierra-Santibanez
Date Published: 2018
DOI: 10.1007/s10458-018-9384-1
Sponsors:
European Union
Spanish Ministry of Economy and Competitiveness (MINECO)
Platforms:
No platforms listed
Model Documentation:
Other Narrative
Model Code URLs:
Model code not found
Abstract
This paper presents an agent-based model of the emergence and evolution
of a language system for Boolean coordination. The model assumes the
agents have cognitive capacities for invention, adoption, abstraction,
repair and adaptation, a common lexicon for basic concepts, and the
ability to construct complex concepts using recursive combinations of
basic concepts and logical operations such as negation, conjunction or
disjunction. It also supposes the agents initially have neither a
lexicon for logical operations nor the ability to express logical
combinations of basic concepts through language. The results of the
experiments we have performed show that a language system for Boolean
coordination emerges as a result of a process of self-organisation of
the agents' linguistic interactions when these agents adapt their
preferences for vocabulary, syntactic categories and word order to those
they observe are used more often by other agents. Such a language system
allows the unambiguous communication of higher-order logic terms
representing logical combinations of basic properties with non-trivial
recursive structure, and it can be reliably transmitted across
generations according to the results of our experiments. Furthermore,
the conceptual and linguistic systems, and simplification and repair
operations of the agent-based model proposed are more general than those
defined in previous works, because they not only allow the simulation of
the emergence and evolution of a language system for the Boolean
coordination of basic properties, but also for the Boolean coordination
of higher-order logic terms of any Boolean type which can represent the
meaning of nouns, sentences, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions,
prepositional phrases and subexpressions not traditionally analysed as
forming constituents, using linguistic devices such as syntactic
categories, word order and function words.
Tags
Agent-based models
language games
Grammatical evolution
Origins and evolution of language
Boolean
coordination
Logical representations and reasoning
Mathematical expressions