M. Gasser
2010
Proceedings of the 8th International Conference on the Evolution of Language, pages 263-270, 2010
The purpose of language is to encode information, so that it can be communicated. Both the producer and the comprehender of a communication want the encoding to be simple. However, they have competing concerns as well. The producer desires conciseness and the comprehender desires ...MORE ⇓
The purpose of language is to encode information, so that it can be communicated. Both the producer and the comprehender of a communication want the encoding to be simple. However, they have competing concerns as well. The producer desires conciseness and the comprehender desires fidelity. This paper argues that the Minimum Description Length Principle (MDL) captures these two pressures on language. A genetic algorithm is used to evolve languages, that take the form of finite-state transducers, using MDL as a fitness metric. The languages that emerge are shown to have the ability to generalize beyond their initial training scope, suggesting that when selecting to satisfy MDL one is implicitly selecting for compositional languages.
2001
The emergence of wordsPDF
Proceedings of the Twenty-third Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 2001
Abstract Children change in their word-learning abilities sometime during the second year of life. The nature of this behavioral change has been taken to suggest an underlying change in mechanism, from associative learning to a more purely symbolic form of learning. We ...
1998
Linguistic Relativity and Word Acquisition: A Computational ApproachPDF
Proceedings of the Twentieth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, pages 244-249, 1998
Abstract Language plays a pervasive role in our day-to-day experience and is likely to have an effect on other non-linguistic aspects of life. At the same time, language is itself constrained by the world. In this paper we study this interaction using Playpen, a ...
1993
The Structure-Grounding ProblemPDF
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society, 1993
Abstract Work on grounding has made a start towards an understanding of where simple perceptual categories come from. But human concepts are made up of more than the simple categories of these models; concepts have internal structure. Within the visual/spatial ...