The Learning and Emergence of Mildly Context Sensitive Languages

This paper describes a framework for studies of the adaptive acquisition and evolution of language, with the following components: language learning begins by associating words with cognitively salient representations (“grounding”); the sentences of each language are determined by properties of lexical items, and so only these need to be transmitted by learning; the learnable languages allow multiple agreements, multiple crossing agreements, and reduplication, as mildly context sensitive and human languages do; infinitely many different languages are learnable; many of the learnable languages include infinitely many sentences; in each language, inferential processes can be defined over succinct representations of the derivations themselves; the languages can be extended by innovative responses to communicative demands. Preliminary analytic results and a robotic implementation are described.

• Type: Conference
• Year: 2003
• Where: ECAL
• Authors: Edward P. Stabler, Travis C. Collier, Gregory M. Kobele, Yoosook Lee, Ying Lin, Jason Riggle, Yuan Yao, Charles E. Taylor
• Keywords: ECAL 2003, Learnable Languages, Multiple Crossing Agreements, Salient Representations