The emergence of internal agreement systems

Beuls, Katrien; Steels, Luc; Höfer, Sebastian

doi:10.1075/ais.3.12beu

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 12 publications

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“…Agent-based models have become important tools for studying historical and evolutionary linguistics (Steels and Vogt 1997;Steels 2001;Loreto and Steels 2007;Pijpops et al 2015). Our contribution adheres to the increasing interest in grammatical agreement studies (Beuls et al 2012;Beuls and Steels 2013). The model is implemented in the Babel2 framework (Steels and Loetzsch 2010;Loetzsch et al 2008), which can be retrieved and installed from https://ai.vub.ac.be/trac/babel2, while the formalism behind the agents' abilities to produce and parse utterances is Fluid Construction Grammar (FCG) (Steels 2011).…”

Section: Anaphoric Reference Gamementioning

confidence: 62%

Modelling pronominal gender agreement in Dutch

Rădulescu

Beuls

2016

BJL

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In the context of cultural evolution, we propose a multi-agent model that allows, through pair-wise interactions between homogeneous individuals of a population, to simulate the shift from a syntactic towards a semantic pronominal agreement system. We explore various gender mapping and learning mechanisms that can allow the agents to form a new agreement system using their semantic knowledge about the world. We investigate whether our strategies can yield cohesive clusterings over the semantic space. We notice that the system reaches full convergence in terms of gender preference at population level and that there are multiple successful ways of dividing the semantic space, including one that reflects the so-called individuation hierarchy, a case attested by a study of a spoken language data.

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Section: Anaphoric Reference Gamementioning

confidence: 62%

Modelling pronominal gender agreement in Dutch

Rădulescu

Beuls

2016

BJL

Self Cite

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“…In this model, the choice of a language is associated with the mixed strategy to play an abstract coordination game (Cooper, 1998) and the learning rule is based on lateral inhibition, that is, successful variants are reinforced and unsuccessful variants are penalized. This type of strategy has been used in naming games experiments (Beuls et al, 2012 ;Steels and Loetzsch, 2012 ;Steels, 2007). In Michaud (2014), the penalization parameter is formed by the product of a objective cost and a subjective bias.…”

Section: Utterance Selection Model With Preferencesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamic preferences and self-actuation of changes in language dynamics

Michaud

2019

Lang. Dyn. Change

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A puzzling fact about linguistic norms is that they are mainly stable, but the conventional variant sometimes changes. These transitions seem to be mostly S-shaped and, therefore, directed. Previous models have suggested possible mechanisms to explain these directed changes, mainly based on a bias favoring the innovative variant. What is still debated is the origin of such a bias. In this paper, we propose a refined taxonomy of mechanisms of language change and identify a family of mechanisms explaining self-actuated language changes. We exemplify this type of mechanism with the preference-based selection mechanism that relies on agents having dynamic preferences for different variants of the linguistic norm. The key point is that if these preferences align through social interactions, then new changes can be actuated even in the absence of external triggers. We present results of a multi-agent model and demonstrate that the model produces trajectories that are typical of language change.

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“…This type of strategy has been used in naming games experiments (Beuls, Steels, & Höfer, 2012;Steels & Loetzsch, 2012;Steels, 2007). In Michaud (2014), the penalization parameter is formed by the product of a objective cost and a subjective bias.…”

Section: Implementation Of the Preference-based Selection Mechanismmentioning

confidence: 99%

Dynamical preferences and self-actuated language changes

Michaud¹

2018

Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on the Evolution of Language (Evolang12)

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A puzzling fact about linguistic norms is that they are mainly stable, but the conventional variant sometimes changes. These transitions seem to be mostly S-shaped and, therefore, directed. Previous models have suggested possible mechanisms to explain these directed changes, mainly based on a bias favoring the innovative variant. What is still debated is what is the mechanism that leads to such a bias. In this paper we propose a refined taxonomy of mechanisms of language change and identify a family a mechanisms explaining self-actuated language changes. We exemplify this type of mechanism with the preference-based selection mechanism that relies on agents having dynamical preferences for different variants of the linguistic norm. The key point is that if these preferences can align through social interactions, then new changes can be actuated. We present results of a multi-agent model and demonstrate that the model produces trajectories that are typical of language change.

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The emergence of internal agreement systems

Cited by 6 publications

References 12 publications

Modelling pronominal gender agreement in Dutch

Modelling pronominal gender agreement in Dutch

Dynamic preferences and self-actuation of changes in language dynamics

Dynamical preferences and self-actuated language changes

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