Tutorial modelling language origins and evolution

5 September 2005

Part of ECAL 2005, Kent, England.

Handouts

See a webcast video with a summary at ComDig

Presenters: Bart de Boer, Paul Vogt and Tony Belpaeme

Evolutionary Linguistics is a new and rapidly growing field that has emerged from the field of artificial life and that is concerned with modelling the origins and evolution of language. It addresses questions such as the evolution of speech, the origins of symbolic categories, grounding, the origins of grammar, the prerequisites for human language, and origins of symbolic communication. Although computational modelling research has yielded interesting results, these are often misinterpreted or overlooked by non-technically schooled researchers in the field. We feel this is partly due to the way the complex and abstract models are presented. Scientists lacking experience in computational modelling often find it difficult to understand the underlying models and their results.

This tutorial offers an introduction for artificial life researchers who are new to evolutionary linguistics and is aimed at understanding the field and helping them set up computational experiments that address open issues. We do this by presenting a thorough overview of the field and by discussing how established ALife and AI techniques can be used to investigate the evolution of language. To illustrate this we present a number of case studies. In addition, we aim to provide suggestions of how to disseminate the research to a multidisciplinary audience, which often include linguists, anthropologists, archeologists, psychologists and biologists.

Topics:

  • Introduction into the field of language evolution.
  • Major research questions in the field of language evolution.
  • Computational modelling of language evolution
    • What computer models can contribute to the understanding of the evolution of language.
    • How to set up a computational model to study language evolution.
    • What techniques to use for which problems.
    • What research topics are suitable for modelling.
  • Case studies plus demonstrations.
  • Disseminating modelling results to non-technical researchers.
  • Possible applications.
  • Some caveats on modelling and presenting results.

Objectives and target audience

We intend our tutorial primarily for young researchers and PhD students in ALife who wish to start (or just have started) researching the rapidly growing field of language evolution and computation. In addition, the tutorial is interesting to those researchers who have an interest in the field of evolutionary linguistics. This tutorial will be specifically aimed at ALife researchers, a community we have not yet been able to reach on the previous two occasions where the tutorial was given. To accommodate our audience, the tutorial will contain a specially tailored introduction to language evolution for ALife researchers.

At the end of the day, we hope the participants

  • have an insight in the field of evolutionary linguistics, especially with respect to the questions that are posed within the field.
  • have become acquainted with the topics that have been studied within this field together with an overview of the most prominent open questions, thus allowing them to initiate their own research
  • understand why researchers outside the ALife community have problems understanding computer models, so that the participant would be able to disseminate his/her results to a wider audience.

To allow each of the groups to follow the course, no other prerequisites are required than a basic academic knowledge of AI.

More information:

The tutorial is based on a previously held tutorial at the Evolution of Language conference and the tutorial that will be held at IJCAI-05 on 31 July 2005 in Edinburgh. We intend to write an overview paper that covers the topics presented at the tutorial. This paper will be included in the handout, which additionally contains all slides and a list of further readings.

For further information, please contact Paul Vogt

Registration:

Registration is to be done through the ECAL 2005 registration.