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Vogt, P. (1998)  The evolution of a lexicon and meaning in robotic agents through self-organization VUB AI-Memo 98-09. Presented at the 2nd International Conference on the Evolution of Language, London, April 6-9 1998 (not published!).

A shorter version (10 pages) has been published in the Proceedings of the Xth Netherlands/Belgium Conference on Artificial Intelligence. eds. Han La Poutré and Jaap van den Herik. CWI Amsterdam, 1998. (.ps.gz)

Abstract This paper discusses interdisciplinary experiments, combining robotics and evolutionary computational linguistics. The goal of the experiments is to investigate if robotic agents can originate a language, in particular a lexicon. In the experiments two robots engage in a series of so-called language games. Starting from the assumption that the robots know how to communicate and are able to detect some sensory information from the environment, the agents ground conceptual meaning and develop a lexicon. The experiments show that the robots are able to form a shared communication system. The paper investigates the influence of using non-linguistic information in the formation of the lexicon, which takes the form of pointing (1) to indicate the topic of the language game, and (2) to give feedback on the outcome of the game.