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Humans leverage shared conversational context to become increasingly successful and efficient at communicating over time. One manifestation of this is the formation of ad hoc linguistic conventions, which allow people to coordinate on…
To communicate with new partners in new contexts, humans rapidly form new linguistic conventions. Recent neural language models are able to comprehend and produce the existing conventions present in their training data, but are not able to…
Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…
Simple reference games are of central theoretical and empirical importance in the study of situated language use. Although language provides rich, compositional truth-conditional semantics to facilitate reference, speakers and listeners may…
Iterated reference games - in which players repeatedly pick out novel referents using language - present a test case for agents' ability to perform context-sensitive pragmatic reasoning in multi-turn linguistic environments. We tested…
The evolution of natural languages poses a riddle to any theoretical perspective based on efficiency considerations. If languages are already optimally effective means of organization and communication of thought, why do they change? And if…
A long tradition of studies in psycholinguistics has examined the formation and generalization of ad hoc conventions in reference games, showing how newly acquired conventions for a given target transfer to new referential contexts.…
We analyze language change over time in a collaborative, goal-oriented instructional task, where utility-maximizing participants form conventions and increase their expertise. Prior work studied such scenarios mostly in the context of…
In the naming game, individuals or agents exchange pairwise local information in order to communicate about objects in their common environment. The goal of the game is to reach a consensus about naming these objects. Originally used to…
How do people talk about things they've never talked about before? One view suggests that a new shared naming system establishes an arbitrary link to a specific target, like proper names that cannot extend beyond their bearers. An…
The current mainstream approach to train natural language systems is to expose them to large amounts of text. This passive learning is problematic if we are interested in developing interactive machines, such as conversational agents. We…
Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…
In natural language, referencing objects at different levels of specificity is a fundamental pragmatic mechanism for efficient communication in context. We develop a novel communication game, the hierarchical reference game, to study the…
Human social life is shaped by repeated interactions, where past experiences guide future behavior. In evolutionary game theory, a key challenge is to identify strategies that harness such memory to succeed in repeated encounters. Decades…
Learning to communicate through interaction, rather than relying on explicit supervision, is often considered a prerequisite for developing a general AI. We study a setting where two agents engage in playing a referential game and, from…
Direct reciprocity is a mechanism for the evolution of cooperation in repeated social interactions. According to this literature, individuals naturally learn to adopt conditionally cooperative strategies if they have multiple encounters…
Dialogue participants often refer to entities or situations repeatedly within a conversation, which contributes to its cohesiveness. Subsequent references exploit the common ground accumulated by the interlocutors and hence have several…
Albrecht and Stone (2018) state that modeling of changing behaviors remains an open problem "due to the essentially unconstrained nature of what other agents may do". In this work we evaluate the adaptability of neural artificial agents…
We examine a naming game with two agents trying to establish a common vocabulary for n objects. Such efforts lead to the emergence of language that allows for an efficient communication and exhibits some degree of homonymy and synonymy.…
We propose a method for training language models in an interactive setting inspired by child language acquisition. In our setting, a speaker attempts to communicate some information to a listener in a single-turn dialogue and receives a…