Why robots?
Laptops Unite! Supercomputer for climate simulation
Cognitive Mechanisms need to be operationalized. Commentary on Cristofaro
Grammaticalization and Semantic Maps: Evidence from Artificial Language Evolution
Semantic maps have offered linguists an appealing and empirically rooted methodology for describing recurrent structural patterns in language development and the multifunctionality of grammatical categories. Although some researchers argue that semantic maps are universal and given, others provide evidence that there are no fixed or universal maps. This paper takes the position that semantic maps […]
Acquisition of Grammar in Autonomous Artificial Systems
Over the past several decades, psycholinguists have gained countless insights into the process of child language acquisition. Can these findings be used for the development of language competence in autonomous artificial systems? This paper reports on our attempt to apply insights from developmental psychology in order to enable artificial systems to acquire language. We consider […]
Open-ended Grounded Semantics
Artificial agents trying to achieve communicative goals in situated interactions in the real-world need powerful computational systems for conceptualizing their environment. In order to provide embodied artificial systems with rich semantics reminiscent of human language complexity, agents need ways of both conceptualizing complex compositional semantic structure and actively reconstructing semantic structure, due to uncertainty and […]
The Future of Content is in Ourselves
Open-ended semantics co-evolving with spatial language
Energy, a Cultural Good
Strategy Competition in the Evolution of Pronouns: A Case-Study of Spanish Leísmo, Laísmo and Loísmo
Pronouns form a particularly interesting part-of-speech for evolutionary linguistics because their development is often lagging behind with respect to other changes in their language. Many hypotheses on pronoun evolution exist ? both for explaining their initial resilience to change as well as for why they eventually cave in to evolutionary pressures ? but so far, […]