Related papers: Language: The missing selection pressure
Psycholinguistic studies of human word processing and lexical access provide ample evidence of the preferred nature of word-initial versus word-final segments, e.g., in terms of attention paid by listeners (greater) or the likelihood of…
Language provides simple ways of communicating generalizable knowledge to each other (e.g., "Birds fly", "John hikes", "Fire makes smoke"). Though found in every language and emerging early in development, the language of generalization is…
Technology for language generation has advanced rapidly, spurred by advancements in pre-training large models on massive amounts of data and the need for intelligent agents to communicate in a natural manner. While techniques can…
The evolution of symbolic communication is a longstanding open research question in biology. While some theories suggest that it originated from sub-symbolic communication (i.e., iconic or indexical), little experimental evidence exists on…
The ability to learn from others (social learning) is often deemed a cause of human species success. But if social learning is indeed more efficient (whether less costly or more accurate) than individual learning, it raises the question of…
In many situations, communication between agents is a critical component of cooperative multi-agent systems, however, it can be difficult to learn or evolve. In this paper, we investigate a simple way in which the emergence of communication…
Research in multi-agent cooperation has shown that artificial agents are able to learn to play a simple referential game while developing a shared lexicon. This lexicon is not easy to analyze, as it does not show many properties of a…
Explainability is a topic of growing importance in NLP. In this work, we provide a unified perspective of explainability as a communication problem between an explainer and a layperson about a classifier's decision. We use this framework to…
A unified theory of language combines a Bayesian cognitive linguistic model of language processing, with the proposal that language evolved by sexual selection for the display of intelligence. The theory accounts for the major facts of…
We are at a stage in our evolution where we do not yet know if we will ever communicate with intelligent beings that have evolved on other planets, yet we are intelligent and curious enough to wonder about this. We find ourselves wondering…
The similarity of the evolution of human languages (or alphabets, bird songs, >...) to biological evolution of species is utilized to study with up to $10^9$ people the rise and fall of languages either by macroscopic differential equations…
Cooperators forgo their interest to benefit others. Thus cooperation should not be favored by natural selection. It challenges the evolutionists, since cooperation is widespread. As one of the resolutions, information spreading has been…
Recent years have seen significant market penetration for voice-based personal assistants such as Apple's Siri. However, despite this success, user take-up is frustratingly low. This position paper argues that there is a habitability gap…
Question Answering has recently received high attention from artificial intelligence communities due to the advancements in learning technologies. Early question answering models used rule-based approaches and moved to the statistical…
To investigate the evolution of syntax, we need to ascertain the evolutionary r\^ole of syntax and, before that, the very nature of syntax. Here, we will assume that syntax is computing. And then, since we are computationally Turing…
Non-binding communication is common in daily life and crucial for fostering cooperation, even though it has no direct payoff consequences. However, despite robust empirical evidence, its evolutionary basis remains poorly understood. Here,…
For communication to happen successfully, a common language is required between agents to understand information communicated by one another. Inducing the emergence of a common language has been a difficult challenge to multi-agent learning…
Rapid progress in machine learning for natural language processing has the potential to transform debates about how humans learn language. However, the learning environments and biases of current artificial learners and humans diverge in…
The origin and development of consciousness is poorly understood. Although it is clearly a naturalistic phenomenon evolved through Darwinian evolution, explaining it in terms of physicochemical, neural, or symbolic mechanisms remains…
It has been proposed that, since the origin of life and the ensuing evolution of biological species, a second evolutionary process has appeared on our planet. It is the evolution of culture-e.g., ideas, beliefs, and artifacts. Does culture…