Simulating Grice: Emergent Pragmatics in Spatialized Game Theory

Anton Benz, Christian Ebert & Robert van Rooij, Language, Games, and Evolution, Springer-Verlag, 2011.

How do conventions of communication emerge? How do sounds or gestures take on a semantic meaning, and how do pragmatic conventions emerge regarding the passing of adequate, reliable, and relevant information? My colleagues and I have attempted in earlier work to extend spatialized game theory to questions of semantics. Agent-based simulations indicate that simple signaling systems emerge fairly naturally on the basis of individual information maximization in environments of wandering food sources and predators. Simple signaling emerges by means of any of various forms of updating on the behavior of immediate neighbors: imitation, localized genetic algorithms, and partial training in neural nets.

2009 IEEE Symposium on Artificial Life, 2009

This paper reviews and extends earlier work on the emergence of semantics in spatialized environments of wandering food sources and predators. Communication of any sophistication demands a semantic base, but also relies on conventions of information transfer, of truthfulness, and of relevance. These are pragmatic conventions, formulated in the linguistics literature in terms of H. P. Grice's maxims of quality, quantity, and relation. Simulations offered here show that conditions sufficient for the emergence of simple semantics are also sufficient for the emergence of simple pragmatics. Pragmatic conventions of precisely the type Grice outlines emerge naturally within spatialized networks of individually informationmaximizing agents in an environment of locally significant events. Patrick Grim 978-1-4244-2763-5/09/$25.00 ©2009 IEEE

2000

Recent years have witnessed an increased interest in formal pragmatics and especially the establishment of game theory as a new research methodology for the study of language use. Within this field of research, three major currents can be distinguished: one is closely related to the Gricean paradigm and aims at a precise foundation of pragmatic reasoning, the second originates in

Philosophy Compass, 2013

Game theoretic pragmatics is a small but growing part of formal pragmatics, the linguistic subfield studying language use. The general logic of a game theoretic explanation of a pragmatic phenomenon is this: (i) the conversational context is modelled as a game between speaker and hearer; (ii) an adequate solution concept then selects the to-be-explained behavior in the game model. For such an explanation to be convincing, both components, game model and solution concept, should be formulated and scrutinized as explicitly as possible. The article demonstrates this by a concise overview of both evolutionary and non-evolutionary approaches to game theoretic pragmatics, arguing for the use of agent-based micro-dynamics within evolutionary, and for the use of epistemic game theory within non-evolutionary approaches.

Adaptive Behavior, 2003

This article reviews recent progress made by computational studies investigating the emergence, via learning or evolutionary mechanisms, of communication among a collection of agents. This work spans issues related to animal communication and the origins and evolution of language. The studies reviewed show how population size, spatial constraints on agent interactions, and the tasks involved can all influence the nature of the communication systems and the ease with which they are learned and/or evolved. Although progress in this area has been substantial, we are able to identify some important areas for future research in the evolution of language, including the need for further computational investigation of key aspects of language such as open vocabulary and the more complex aspects of syntax.

Signaling games with reinforcement learning have been used to model the evolution of term languages (Lewis 1969, Convention. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press; Skyrms 2006, "Signals" Presidential Address. Philosophy of Science Association for PSA). In this article, syntactic games, extensions of David Lewis's original senderreceiver game, are used to illustrate how a language that exploits available syntactic structure might evolve to code for states of the world. The evolution of a language occurs in the context of available vocabulary and syntax-the role played by each component is compared in the context of simple reinforcement learning.

PLOS ONE

Recently, emergence of signaling conventions, among which language is a prime example, draws a considerable interdisciplinary interest ranging from game theory, to robotics to evolutionary linguistics. Such a wide spectrum of research is based on much different assumptions and methodologies, but complexity of the problem precludes formulation of a unifying and commonly accepted explanation. We examine formation of signaling conventions in a framework of a multi-agent reinforcement learning model. When the network of interactions between agents is a complete graph or a sufficiently dense random graph, a global consensus is typically reached with the emerging language being a nearly unique object-word mapping or containing some synonyms and homonyms. On finite-dimensional lattices, the model gets trapped in disordered configurations with a local consensus only. Such a trapping can be avoided by introducing a population renewal, which in the presence of superlinear reinforcement restores an ordinary surface-tension driven coarsening and considerably enhances formation of efficient signaling.

Advances in Complex …, 2010

This paper reports the results of a multi-agent simulation designed to study the emergence and evolution of symbolic communication. The novelty of this model is that it considers some interactional and spatial constraints to this process that have been dis- regarded by previous research. The model is used to give an account of the implications of differences in the agents’ behaviour, which are embodied in a spatial environment. Two communicational dimensions are identified: the frequency with which agents refer to different topics over time and the spatial limitations on reaching recipients. We use the model to point out some interesting emergent communicational properties when the agents’ behaviour is altered by considering those two dimensions. We show the group of agents able to reach more recipients and less prone to changing the topic have the highest likelihood of driving the emergence and evolution of symbolic communication.

American Economic Review, 2008

Language is arguably a powerful coordination device in real-life interactions. We here develop a game-theoretic model of pre-play communication that generalizes the cheap-talk approach by way of introducing a meaning correspondence between messages and actions, and postulating two axioms met by natural languages. Deviations from this correspondence are called dishonest and players have a lexicographic preference for honesty, second to material payoffs. The model is first applied to two-sided preplay communication in finite and symmetric two-player games and we establish that, in generic and symmetric n × ncoordination games, a Nash equilibrium component in such a lexicographic communication game is evolutionarily stable if and only if it results in the unique Pareto efficient outcome of the underlying game. We extend the approach to one-sided communication in finite, not necessarily symmetric, two-player games.