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Evolving Grounded Spatial Language Strategies

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Abstract

Each natural language phrase is evidence for a particular strategy of construing reality. One domain where this has been extensively studied is spatial language, which reveals an enormous amount of variation of conceptualization strategies both within a particular language and cross-culturally. This paper proposes a computational formalism for representing conceptualization strategies and shows how the formalism can be used to study and explain the evolution and emergence of spatial conceptualization strategies and their impact on shared grounded communication systems.

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Notes

  1. Obviously, there is more to the system than we have space to explain here. In particular, German requires the handling of complex syntactic phenomena such as morphology and complex word classes, and semantic ambiguity that fall beyond this paper (see [16, 18] for a detailed discussion).

  2. α is given by the experimenter and in all experiments described here α=0.5.

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Acknowledgements

I am greatly indebted to Masahiro Fujita and Hideki Shimomura for supporting this research. I thank Simon Pauw, Martin Loetzsch, Wouter van den Broeck, Joris Bleys and Luc Steels who have made contributions to aspects of IRL.

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    Michael Spranger

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Correspondence to Michael Spranger.

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Spranger, M. Evolving Grounded Spatial Language Strategies. Künstl Intell 27, 97–106 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13218-013-0245-4

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