Simulating the Emergence of Grammatical Agreement in Multi-Agent Language Games

Grammatical agreement is present in many of the world's languages today and has become an essential feature that guides linguistic processing. When two words in a sentence are said to "agree", this means that they share certain features such as "gender", "number", "person" or others. The primary hypothesis of this paper is that marking agreement within one linguistic phrase reduces processing effort as phrasal constituents can more easily be recognized. The drive to reduce processing effort introduces the rise of agreement marking in a population of multiple agents by means of an incrementally aligned mapping between the most discriminatory features of a particular linguistic unit and their associative markers. A series of experiments compare feature selection methods for one-to-one agreement mappings, and show how an agreement system can be bootstrapped.