J. Hurford, "Biological Evolution of the Saussurean Sign as a Component of the Language Acquisition Device," Lingua, 77 (1989) 187--222.  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....are mappings between phoneme sequences and underlying meanings. Representative experiments enabled by the system are discussed. I. INTRODUCTION In recent years there has been a resurgence of interest in language evolution, with a great deal of work in computer simulations of evolution dynamics [1], 2] 3] 4] 5] 6] 7] 8] 9] 10] This paper presents an implemented workbench for experimenting with simulated evolution of language in which a range of interesting parameters may be explored. In the sense of [11] ours is a system for parameter tuning rather than automatic adaptive ....

....construction, the number of possible distinct combinations of event with arguments is infinite. We see it as extremely important that the space of possible things to talk about not be by assumption finite. Note that some research assumes finite meaning spaces [18] similarly, the architecture of [1] depends on finite association matrix manipulations and hence finite bounds on the number of meanings. 19] provides simulations in which compositionality emerges within a system about which 100 meanings are available. In our system there is no guarantee that even with extremely long runs that an ....

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James Hurford, "Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device," Lingua, vol. 77, pp. 187--222, 1989.

....introduces new challenges and thus the creation of new meanings. In the last five years, substantial progress has been reported on these objectives (see the overview in [13] There has been a first wave of research in the early 1990 s strongly inspired by artificial life concepts ( 6] 19] [3], 7] 17] This early research has often used a genetic approach and assumed that the set of meanings is fixed and given a priori by the designer. The primary emphasis was on understanding the emergence and evolution of animal communication rather than human natural language. There has been a ....

....the topic. The other objects form the background. The speaker then gives a linguistic hint to the hearer. The linguistic hint is an utterance that identifies the topic with respect to the objects in the background. For example, if the context contains [1] a red square, 2] a blue triangle, and [3] a green circle, then the speaker may say something like the red one to communicate that [1] is the topic. If the context contains also a red triangle, he has to be more precise and say something like the red square . Of course, the Talking Heads do not say the red square but use their own ....

Hurford, J. (1989) Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77. pp. 187-222.

....interaction protocol, and (iii) a learning algorithm. Linguistic Representation With representation we mean here a formalism to represent the linguistic abilities of agents, ranging from recurrent neural networks (Batali, 1998) or rewriting grammars (Kirby, 2000) to a simple associative memory (Hurford, 1989; Steels, 1996; Oliphant Batali, 1996; De Boer, 1999; Kaplan, 2000) In the model described in this paper, we will use a simple list of associations between linguistics forms (words) and their meanings. Each association has a score that represents the cost (or inversed strength) of that ....

....this paper. In a variant of the naming game, the meaning of the expressed form is immediately available to the hearer (such as in situations where the speakers points at the object that is the topic of a conversation) This variant has been used by most language game models studied so far (e.g. Hurford, 1989; Steels, 1996; Oliphant Batali, 1996; Batali, 1998; Kirby, 2000; Kaplan, 2000; Batali, 2000) Learning Algorithm The learning algorithm that agents use to improve their linguistic abilities is in most models very simple. Most of the algorithms can be considered variants of stochastic ....

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HURFORD, J. (1989). Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77, 187--222.

....speci cs of natural syntax, such as the position of auxiliary verbs in an English sentence. Rather, these models can give insights in the origins of some general but fundamental aspects of natural language. e.g. the facts that human language is (in nitely) expressive; for a large part speci c [10, 21, 18] and distinctive [6] compositional [1, 16, 2, 12] recursive [8, 11, 24] diverse on a global scale, but uniform on a local scale; dynamic, constantly subject to innovations. And that languages share universal tendencies [13, 6] and are used for very diverse purposes, including information ....

James Hurford. Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77(2):187-222, 1989.

....of communication (e.g. 1, 3] Such models are not primarily concerned with the origin of the language learner s biases but appeal to a uniquely human preexisting mental capacity to explain the uniqueness of language. Recent work by Oliphant [5, 6] building on pioneering work by Hurford [2], focuses on the more basic issue of the emergence of arbitrary and conventionalised word meaning. Oliphant works within the cultural adaptation framework and makes two claims. Firstly, human language is the only learned symbolic communication system. Secondly, language is unique in this respect ....

James R. Hurford. Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77:187--222, 1989.

....and in this paper, we present an analysis of this situation. We view languages as probabilistic associations between form and meaning and develop a natural measure of intelligibility, F (L 1 , L 2 ) between two languages, L 1 and L 2 , which is a generalization of a similar function introduced in [Hurford 1989]. We ask the following question: if there is a biological cultural technological advantage for an agent to increase its intelligibility with the rest of the population, what are the ways to do this The task of increasing intelligibility reduces ultimately to three related subproblems: Given ....

....communication, human languages and artificial languages. For instance, it often makes sense to talk about a lexical matrix as a formal description of human mental vocabularies. It is introduced to describe the arbitrary relations between discrete words and discrete concepts of human languages ([Hurford 1989], Miller 1996] Regier et al. 2001] Komarova Nowak 2001] Each column of the lexical matrix corresponds to a particular word meaning (or concept) each row corresponds to a particular word form (or word image) In the Saussurean terminology of arbitrary sign, the lexical matrix provides the ....

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Hurford, J. R. (1989) Biological Evolution of the Saussurean Sign as a Component of the Language Acquisition Device, Lingua, 77, pp. 187--222. 36

....learn perfect English if brought up in England) is uncontroversial. The controversy lies in the nature of these transmissions and the source of innovations. An intriguing approach, however, has been added to the existing ones: mathematical and computer modeling of language origins, pioneered by Hurford (1989), Steels (1997a) Batali (1994) Hashimoto Ikegami (1996) An effort is made in this line of research to understand the dynamics of language evolution by studying simple models ( minimal models ) of communicating agents. The communication in these models resembles real communication only in ....

HURFORD, J. (1989). Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77, 187--222.

....equipped them with the necessary mental apparatus, or only the unique set of circumstances experienced by our ancestors resulted in selection for the mental apparatus required for the cultural evolution of language to begin. Recent work by Oliphant [6, 7] building on pioneering work by Hurford [2], focuses on the more basic issue of the emergence of arbitrary and conventionalised word meaning (see [4] for an alternative approach to a similar issue) Oliphant works within the cultural adaptation framework and makes two claims. Firstly, human language is the only learned symbolic ....

James R. Hurford. Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77:187--222, 1989.

....equipped them with the necessary mental apparatus, or only the unique set of circumstances experienced by our ancestors resulted in selection for the mental apparatus required for the cultural evolution of language to begin. Recent work by Oliphant (1998;1999) building on pioneering work by Hurford (1989), focuses on the more basic issue of the emergence of arbitrary and conventionalised word meaning. Oliphant works within the cultural adaptation framework and makes two claims. Firstly, human language is the only learned symbolic communication system. Secondly, language is unique in this respect ....

Hurford, J.R. (1989). Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77, 187--222.

....(Fig. 1) holds that the human language capability is laid down in an innate Universal Grammar (UG) which contains a number of principles heeded by all languages. Many of these principles must have originated in an evolutionary selective pressure towards efficient communication. For instance, Hurford (1989) shows that if speakers expressed each concept (the signifi of Saussure 1916) with the same sound image (Saussure s signifiant) that they have seen listeners interpret as referring to that concept, and if listeners interpreted each word in the way that they have heard others speak with a ....

.... be to for the learner to speak the same words that she hears others speak with a certain apparent meaning, and to base her reactions to speech of others on the meaning apparently intended by the speaker (and not on the meaning apparently distilled by other listeners, which is the third strategy Hurford investigates) Hurford shows that if the learning strategy is hereditary and exhibits genetic variation, and successful communicators raise more offspring than others, the successful strategy of using the same words in speaking as well as listening will emerge as an innate property throughout the ....

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Hurford (1989). Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77:2. 187--222.

.... The past few years, a number of researchers have become interested in building operational theories for how language and the conceptualisation of reality that underlies language can bootstrap itself, both in a developing single individual (ontogenesis) and in the human species (glossogenesis) (Hurford, 1989), Steels, 1979b) Kirby, 1999) An operational theory is one that is sufficiently worked out and formalised that it can be tested by computer simulations and robotic experiments. Whether such a theory is also valid for humans remains an open question, but at least the theory is operationally ....

Hurford, J. (1989). Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77, pp. 187-222.

.... protolanguage to a more efficient, syntactical language system (Pinker Bloom, 1990; Nowak Krakauer, 1999) We study this transition in a computational model of an evolving population of communicating agents. The main advantages of computational and mathematical models such as (Hurford, 1989; Steels, 1997; Hashimoto Ikegami, 1996; Nowak Krakauer, 1999) are that they are relatively precise and productive, in the sense that they generate new concepts and hypotheses. The main contribution so far is that they have shown the plausibility of 1 Present address: Sony CSL, 6, Rue ....

HURFORD, J. (1989). Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77.

....human language. Note that such an interactionist account di ers fundamentally from a naive some parts of language are innate, some are learned view. Computational modeling Recent work that studied such interactions in computational models has produced a wealth of new hypotheses and insights (Hurford, 1989; Hashimoto Ikegami, 1996; Batali, 1997; Steels, 1997; De Boer, 1999; Kirby, 2000; Nowak Krakauer, 1999; Hurford, 2000) Such models are relatively precise implementations of the underlying set of assumptions, and allow one to evaluate the internal coherence of such a set. Moreover, they are ....

....typically out compete non syntactic elements, because the former are inherently used more often. Nowak Krakauer (1999) studied a game theoretic model of language evolution and identify a di erent mechanism that can account for the emergence of syntax. Using the matrix representations of Hurford (1989), they infer a linguistic error limit . Given that an individual makes mistakes in distinguishing sounds with a probability that depends on the similarity between those sounds, Nowak Krakauer calculate a limit on the number of messages an individual can convey. They show mathematically that ....

Hurford, J. (1989). Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77, 187-222.

....form as the imitator model, being a three layer feedforward neural network. However, the crucial difference is that the new networks, which will be referred to as obverter (Oliphant and Batali, 1997) 3 networks, map from input signals to output 3 Obverter networks are the equivalent of what Hurford (1989) termed Saussurean learners. 17 System Type successes Unhomonymous 54 Partially Homonymous 16 Fully Homonymous 1 Figure 15: The success of obverter networks at learning communication systems of the three types, with small random initial weights. meanings the direction of the mapping ....

Hurford, J. R. (1989). Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77, 187--222.

....a perceptual nature (the tetragon underlying spec output input ) 8. 2 Why would it be good to share FAITH constraints If the recognition and production grammars shared their faithfulness constraints, this would implement the reciprocity of the Saussurean sign (Saussure 1916: 99) Hurford (1989) showed that this strategy has evolutionary advantages. 8.3 Can production and comprehension be handled by a single grammar after all If we take the bold move of including the lexical access constraints in the production grammar as well, we see that these constraints would apply vacuously in ....

Hurford, James (1989). Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77: 187--222.

....of a language learner user and also that LAgts are elements of a decentralized distributed system. It should be clear from the definition of a LAgt that the simulation does not attempt to characterize the emergence or origin of the LAD. It assumes a prior population of Saussurean LAgts, to use Hurford s (1989) term, with at least the capacity to represent and learn word meaning associations, and with the basic architecture of a LAD. 24 P setting compatibility implements a weak notion of communicative success. Thus, there is no Gricean entailment of successful transmission of speaker intentions, or of ....

Hurford, Jim (1989) `Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device', Lingua, vol.77, 187--222.

....a perceptual nature (the tetragon #underlying# #spec# output input ) 8. 2 Why would it be good to share FAITH constraints If the recognition and production grammars shared their faithfulness constraints, this would implement the reciprocity of the Saussurean sign (Saussure 1916: 99) Hurford (1989) showed that this strategy has evolutionary advantages. 8.3 Can production and comprehension be handled by a single grammar after all If we take the bold move of including the lexical access constraints in the production grammar as well, we see that these constraints would apply vacuously in ....

Hurford, James (1989). Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77: 187--222.

....the agent prefers f 2 when m 1 needs to be expressed (and not f 1 ) When f 1 is heard, the same agent nevertheless expects m 1 . The pair m 1 ; f 1 is in the expected language but not in the produced language. The expected language includes the production language but not vice versa. See [Hurford, 1989] and [Oliphant, 1996] for a further exploration of the coordination between production and comprehension systems. f 1 f 2 m 1 0.6 0.7 m 2 0.4 0.3 Given the preferred language for a single agent, it is straightforward to determine the language of the group as being the set of word meaning ....

J. Hurford. Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77:187--222, 1989.

....goes beyond this earlier work by using vision as source of sensory data and by showing the very beginnings of syntax. The research reported here is related to a lot of work currently being done in machine learning as well as recent work on the origins of language, as discussed in [14] 9] 1] [7] and [10] This related research is extensively surveyed in [22] The rest of the paper is in four sections. The next section (section 2) introduces the experimental setup used to validate mechanisms for the origins of language and meaning and study their performance. Then the main principles ....

Hurford, J. (1989) Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77:187-222, 1989.

....and its content (e.g. the origin of space, time, objecthood, etc. This research is related to a lot of work currently being done in machine learning but most specifically to recent work on the origins of language, such as by [MacLennan, 1991] Hutchins and Hazelhurst, 1995] Batali, 1997] [Hurford, 1989] [Kirby, 1996] and others, as has been extensively surveyed in [Steels, 1997b] One of the key hypotheses underlying our approach is that communication through language is the main driving force in bootstrapping the representational capacities of intelligent agents. It is also the way through ....

Jim Hurford. Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77:187-222, 1989.

....that arise if a purely observational learning paradigm is used. In this framework, no reinforcement signal is used. The communicative behavior of a learning individual is based solely on observations of the behavior of others. The model of observational learning I use is similar to that used by Hurford (1989) and Oliphant and Batali (1997) I assume that the life of an individual proceeds in two stages: a learning stage and a behaving stage. During the learning stage, an individual observes the behavior of the other individuals in the population, and uses these observations to construct its own ....

Hurford, J. (1989). Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77, 187--222.

....1998b) though this would involve abandoning the strictly ordered, consistent acquisition procedure presented here. 17 It should, therefore, be clear that the model does not attempt to characterize the emergence or origin of the LAD. It assumes a prior population of Saussurean LAgts, to use Hurford s (1989) term, with at least the capacity to represent and learn word:meaning associations, and with the basic architecture of a LAD. 18 P setting compatibility implements a weak notion of communicative success. Thus, there is no Gricean entailment of successful transmission of speaker intentions, or of ....

Hurford, J. (1989) `Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device', Lingua, vol.77, 187--222.

....framework, it is necessary to come up with a formalism with which to describe it. As is always the case with such a formalism, it will be an abstraction from the reality, and will involve numerous simplifying assumptions. Previous models of communication have been presented by Lewis (1969) Hurford (1989), and Skyrms (1996) The present model shares much in common with this previous work, particularly that of Hurford. III.A Signals and meanings We will assume that there is a set, E, of environmental states that an animal is capable of distinguishing between, and a set, A, of distinct actions that ....

....communication within a reinforcement paradigm, fewer researchers have studied observational learning models. Billard and Dautenhahn (1997) uses a form of observational learning in a situation involving two robotic agents one the teacher and one the learner engaged in a simple following task. Hurford (1989) uses an observational learning paradigm and addresses many of the same issues that will be discussed here. Because his work is so relevant, I will give an analysis of his results in section VI.D.5, relating them to the results I present. Perhaps one reason for the comparative lack of research in ....

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Hurford, J. (1989). Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77, 187--222.

.... whole this biological endowment is shared by all members of our species, then we have a ready explanation for universals they are simply the result of idiosyncratic properties of the innate mechanism for acquisition (see, e.g. Hoekstra Kooij 1988) Various authors (e.g. Pinker Bloom 1990, Hurford 1989, Hurford 1991) have argued that a complex innately specified language acquisition device (LAD) must have evolved through natural selection. All we have argued is that human language, like other specialized biological systems, evolved by natural selection. Our conclusion is based on two facts ....

HURFORD, JAMES. 1989. Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua 77.187--222.

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J. Hurford, "Biological Evolution of the Saussurean Sign as a Component of the Language Acquisition Device," Lingua, 77 (1989) 187--222.

No context found.

Hurford, J. R. (1989). Biological evolution of the saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77:189--222.

No context found.

J. R. Hurford. Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77:187--222, 1989.

No context found.

J. R. Hurford. Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a component of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77:187--222, 1989.

No context found.

Hurford, J. (1989) Biological evolution of the Saussurean sign as a componnet of the language acquisition device. Lingua, 77. pp. 187-222.

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