The Development of a Lexicon Based on Behavior

This paper investigates whether a group of agents may develop a common lexicon relating words to situations by a process of self-organization. Each agent independently decides which situations are useful to distinguish , based on its experience with the environment. It then starts to associate signals with each situation. The agents adapt their own associations based on the signals they received from other agents. The system is monitored using measures which reeect the development of the lexicons over time. The result of the distributed activities of the agents is that a coherent shared lexicon emerges linking signals to situations.