Action Oriented Adaptive Language Games

In a recent article (Lindblom and Ziemke, 2002) the authors argue much of the work in epigenetic robotics and related elds has either direct or indirect inspiration from the work of the Psychologist and theoretician L. S. Vygotsky. And yet despite much interest in what a Vygotsky inspired robotics might look like, and theoretical schemes where Vygotskian ideas play a central role e.g. (Zlatev, 1999) there has been little in the way of implemented systems (either robotic or simulated) that demonstrate the practicality of this endeavour. At least one implemented system: Vygovorotsky (Kulakov and Stojanov, 2002), does aim to build a developmental architecture along the lines of some of Vygotsky's ideas. But, although this architecture might plausibly be a basis for a future Vygotskian robotics, the authors candidly admit that until a language component is incorporated in the architecture which is no trivial matter Vygovorotsky's name is rather a promissory note suggesting the way for future work. One reason for this di culty is that Vygotsky's principal interest was in the development of higher psychological functions and these entailed both the use of signs and the internalisation of speech. For Vygotsky "the most signi cant moment in the course of intellectual development, which gives birth to the purely human forms of practical and abstract intelligence, occurs when speech and practical activity, two previously completely independent lines of development converge." (Vygotsky, 1978). To judge by current research both in humanoid robotic and simulated agent research, it might be considered beyond the current state of the art to incorporate such concerns. However, the framing of recent work such as the above around Vygotsky's ideas suggests that many believe this type of research to be both necessary and plausible. The question is how to pursue it? Work in the related elds of the evolution of language using multi-agent systems some of which is collected in (Cangelosi and Parisi, 2002) has shown the viability of new techniques for studying many aspects of language and language development based on symbol grounding (Cangelosi et al., 2000), and the iterated learning model (Kirby and Hurford, 2002) . In most of this work, however, the job of learning a language is abstracted away from any other type of psychological process or situated activity. For Vygotsky the development of language could only be properly understood through the development of joint social and practical activity. This raises the question of whether it might be possible, with models similar to those currently being used to understand the evolution of language, to instead model language development and its relationship to the development of other higher cognitive processes. To put this in more Vygotskian terms, can we use some of these techniques to model the involvement of language-like systems in the development of higher practical activity? This poster illustrates a model which extends contemporary approaches to simulating language learning dynamics. It details a multi-agent system featuring symbol grounding which takes elements from (Cangelosi et al., 2000) particularly in regard to the agent's internal architecture. The world in which the agents are situated resembles in conception the talking heads scenario of (Steels, 1999) except our agents not only talk about the objects in the world but act upon them. We also propose extensions to the theoretical model of the Adaptive Language Game (hereafter ALG) framework (Steels, 2000) which aims to show how this model can be extended for modelling the shifting interrelationship between cognition and communication in a neo-Vygotskian manner. Building upon the ALG framework we elaborate the design for a new multi-agent system which examines speci cally how communicative agents might autonomously develop grounded, compositional communication systems ('languages') to mediate, extend and lter their collective behavioural repertoire. We make three novel additions to the existing frame-