Deixis and the Development of Naming in Asynchronously Interacting Connectionist Agents

In this paper we describe a series of interaction games in which an elementary ‘protolanguage’ is generated based on innate deictic ability in a community of asynchronously interacting connectionist agents. Deixis—or pointing (and its perception)—combined with interaction and ‘speech’ generation ability support the emergence and drift of shared names within a family of ‘parent’ and ‘child’ agents. An agent may point at a ‘referent’ agent and then associate any perceived speech with the referent. Perceived speech is either received as a response from an interlocutor or else the agent itself may generate speech, if it points but hears no ‘name’ in response. Deixis toward a referent followed by perceived speech is associated (‘learned’) by the agent’s recurrent time-delay connectionist artificial neural network establishing a basis for naming. Therefore subsequent deixis with the same referent triggers attempted reproduction of the associated ensuing speech. The interaction may also be ‘overheard’ by other agents which then may associate the particular deitic acts perceived with the speech heard, resulting in a propagation of naming conventions. Interaction, via pointing and speaking, is asynchronously scheduled, and in this respect biologically plausible. Issues related to mirrorneurons, attention and deictic gaze, development of vocabularies, as well as synonomy, lexical drift and convergence are also discussed briefly. This illustrates the dynamics and development of deixis-grounded naming systems in (asynchronous) interaction and thus extends the work of Steels on the emergence of vocabularies in communities of agents as well as the work of Billard, Hayes, and Dautenhahn on the grounding and learning vocabularies in robots and agents using connectionist methods.