The Emergence of Morphosyntactic Case Systems
Despite centuries of research, the origins of grammatical case are more mysterious than ever. This paper addresses some unanswered questions through language game experiments in which a multi-agent population self-organizes a morphosyntactic case system. The experiments show how the formal part of grammatical constructions may pressure such emergent systems to become more economical.
The Evolution of Case Systems for Marking Event Structure
Case has fascinated linguists for centuries without however revealing its most important secrets. This paper offers operational explanations for case through language game experiments in which autonomous agents describe real-world events to each other. The experiments demonstrate (a) why a language may develop a case system, (b) how a population can self-organize a case system, […]
Not as Awful as it Seems: Explaining German Case through Computational Experiments in Fluid Construction Grammar
German case syncretism is often assumed to be the accidental by-product of historical development. This paper contradicts this claim and argues that the evolution of German case is driven by the need to optimize the cognitive effort and memory required for processing and interpretation. This hypothesis is supported by a novel kind of computational experiments […]
Diagnostics and Repairs in Fluid Construction Grammar
Linguistic utterances are full of errors and novel expressions, yet linguistic communication is remarkably robust. This paper presents a double-layered architecture for open-ended language processing, in which ?diagnostics? and ?repairs? operate on a meta-level for detecting and solving problems that may occur during habitual processing on a routine layer. Through concrete operational examples, this paper […]
Emergent Action Language on Real Robots
Almost all languages in the world have a way to formulate commands. Commands specify actions that the body should undertake (such as “stand up”), possibly involving other objects in the scene (such as “pick up the red block”). Action language involves various competences, in particular (i) the ability to perform an action and recognize which […]
Fluid Construction Grammar: The New Kid on the Block
Cognitive linguistics has reached a stage of maturity where many researchers are looking for an explicit formal grounding of their work. Unfortunately, most current models of deep language processing incorporate assumptions from generative grammar that are at odds with the cognitive movement in linguistics. This demonstration shows how Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG), a fully operational […]
Grounding Language through Evolutionary Language Games
This chapter introduces a new experimental paradigm for studying issues in the grounding of language and robots, and the integration of all aspects of intelligence into a single system. The paradigm is based on designing and implementing artificial agents so that they are able to play language games about situations they perceive and act upon […]
Fine-grained CPU Throttling to Reduce the Energy Footprint of Volunteer Computing
Open-ended Procedural Semantics
This chapter introduces the computational infrastructure that is used to bridge the gap between results from sensorimotor processing and language. It consists of a system called Incremental Recruitment Language (IRL) that is able to configure a network of cognitive operations to achieve a particular communicative goal. IRL contains mechanisms for finding such networks, chunking subnetworks […]
A Perceptual System for Language Game Experiments
This chapter describes key aspects of a visual perception system as a key component for language game experiments on physical robots. The vision system is responsible for segmenting the continuous flow of incoming visual stimuli into segments and computing a variety of features for each segment. This happens by a combination of bottom-up way processing […]