Stochasticity as a Source of Innovation in Language Games
Luc Steels
SONY Computer
Science Laboratory - Paris
http://www.csl.sony.fr/
Frederic Kaplan
Sony Computer
Science Laboratory - Paris
Abstract
Recent work on viewing language as a complex adaptive system
has shown that self-organisation can explain how a group
of distributed agents can reach a coherent set of linguistic
conventions and how such a set can be preserved from one
generation to the next based on cultural transmission. The paper
continues these investigations by exploring the presence of
stochasticity in the various aspects of lexical
communication: stochasticity in the non-linguistic communication
constraining meaning, the transmission of the message, and the
retrieval from memory. We show that there is an upperbound
on the amount of stochasticity which can be tolerated and that
stochasticity causes and maintains language variation.
Results are based on the further exploration
of a minimal computational model of language interaction in a
group of distributed agents, called the naming game.