Séminaire SMA
Recent Results in Constructive Language Evolution and its Generalizations
Wednesday, March 19, 2008Les Gasser & Samarth Swarup (University ot llinois at Urbana-Champaign - UIUC, Etats-Unis)
Recently the evolution of language has emerged as a significant area of interdisciplinary inquiry. Most current studies theorize about the evolutionary emergence of natural human (and animal) communications, but some researchers are also concerned with how autonomous agents might constructively develop their own languages independently of human designers. We have called language "the last frontier of autonomy" for such agents, and we pose a set of key issues that agent-oriented language evolution research needs to handle. In addition, we propose that, from an evolutionary perspective, language is "simply" a collective information system with specific representational and dynamic properties. Because of this, language can be viewed as a model for many other information systems in a similar class, and solutions to the problems of language evolution will apply elsewhere, providing significant explanatory power. In this talk we overview the language evolution landscape and introduce our set of central issues for constructive language evolution research. We present several findings from our own work addressing these issues. Finally, we discuss how language may generalize to other information systems from an evolutionary viewpoint, specifically to the evolution of representation and communication processes in biological systems at several complexity levels.
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thomas.genin (at) nulllip6.fr