Emergence of Linguistic Conventions in Multi-Agent Systems Through Situated Communicative Interactions.

The field of emergent communication investigates the emergence of shared linguistic conventions among autonomous agents engaged in cooperative tasks that require communication. Conventions that arise through self-organisation are known to be more robust, flexible, and adaptive, and it removes the need for hand-crafting communication protocols. In my PhD research, I investigate how artificial agents can co-construct such conventions of linguistic structures in reference-based tasks. This problem is tackled using the language game experimental paradigm which aims to model the processes underlying the emergence and evolution of human languages. My primary contribution thus far introduces a novel methodology for the language game paradigm in the emergent setting. Using the methodology, agents can establish through self-organisation an emergent language that enables them to refer to arbitrary entities in their environment using single-word utterances. For the first time, the methodology is directly applicable to any dataset that describes entities in terms of continuously-valued features. The next phase in my research is to move from single-word utterances to multi-word utterances through the emergence of grammatical structures.