A cross-situational strategy for damping homonymy in The Naming Game

Recently there has been a growing interest in the properties and formal analysis of multi-agent systems bootstrapping a communication system (see e.g. .(Baronchelli et al., 2005) and the contribution of (De Vylder and Tuyls, 2005), this workshop.) Although very interesting and promising results were obtained in these studies, major simplifications were made. For example, although much larger populations are considered than was the case in most earlier work, both the cited works (1) assume the possibility of meaning transfer, i.e. the hearer always exactly knows the speaker’s intended meaning independent of whether he understands the speaker’s utterance and (2) only consider single-word utterances. In this draft we first consider what happens when relaxing the meaning-transfer assumption, and propose a cross-situational learning scheme that allows a population of agents to still bootstrap a common lexicon under this condition. We empirically show the validity of the scheme and thereby improve on the results reported in (Smith, 2003) and (Vogt and Coumans, 2003) in which no satisfactory solution was found. We then continue to identify some problems that arise when abandoning the single-word utterance simplification. However, no solid solutions are proposed for the identified problems. It is not our aim to reduce the importance of previous work, instead we are excited by recent results and hope to stimulate further research by pointing towards some new challenges. Draft prepared for the Workshop on Semiotic Dynamics of Language Games, Bagnovignoni (Siena Italy) 8-11