The Emergence of Grammar in Communicating Autonomous Robotic Agents

Over the past five years, the topic of the origins of language is gaining prominence as one of the big unresolved questions of cognitive science. Artificial Intelligence can make a major contribution to this problem by working out precise, testable models using grounded robotic agents which interact with a real world environment and communicate among themselves or with humans about this environment. A potential side effect op this basic research are new technologies for man-machine interaction based on the negotiation of shared conventions.