Discovering Properties of Inflectional Morphology in Neural Emergent Communication

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Gilberti, Miles, Storks, Shane, Dai, Huteng
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Gilberti, Miles
Storks, Shane
Dai, Huteng
author_facet Gilberti, Miles
Storks, Shane
Dai, Huteng
contents Emergent communication (EmCom) with deep neural network-based agents promises to yield insights into the nature of human language, but remains focused primarily on a few subfield-specific goals and metrics that prioritize communication schemes which represent attributes with unique characters one-to-one and compose them syntactically. We thus reinterpret a common EmCom setting, the attribute-value reconstruction game, by imposing a small-vocabulary constraint to simulate double articulation, and formulating a novel setting analogous to naturalistic inflectional morphology (enabling meaningful comparison to natural language communication schemes). We develop new metrics and explore variations of this game motivated by real properties of inflectional morphology: concatenativity and fusion. Through our experiments, we discover that simulated phonological constraints encourage concatenative morphology, and emergent languages replicate the tendency of natural languages to fuse grammatical attributes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_05843
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Discovering Properties of Inflectional Morphology in Neural Emergent Communication
Gilberti, Miles
Storks, Shane
Dai, Huteng
Computation and Language
Emergent communication (EmCom) with deep neural network-based agents promises to yield insights into the nature of human language, but remains focused primarily on a few subfield-specific goals and metrics that prioritize communication schemes which represent attributes with unique characters one-to-one and compose them syntactically. We thus reinterpret a common EmCom setting, the attribute-value reconstruction game, by imposing a small-vocabulary constraint to simulate double articulation, and formulating a novel setting analogous to naturalistic inflectional morphology (enabling meaningful comparison to natural language communication schemes). We develop new metrics and explore variations of this game motivated by real properties of inflectional morphology: concatenativity and fusion. Through our experiments, we discover that simulated phonological constraints encourage concatenative morphology, and emergent languages replicate the tendency of natural languages to fuse grammatical attributes.
title Discovering Properties of Inflectional Morphology in Neural Emergent Communication
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.05843