Situated Grounded Word Semantics

The paper reports on experiments in which autonomous visually grounded agents bootstrap an ontology and a shared lexicon without prior design nor other forms of human intervention. The agents do so while playing a particular languagegame called the guessing game. We show that synonymy and polysemy arise as emergent properties in the language but also that there are tendencies to dampen it so as to make the language more coherent and thus more optimal from the viewpoints of communicative success, cognitive complexity, and learnability.