One-to-Many Communication and Compositionality in Emergent Communication
Abstract: Compositional languages leverage rules that derive meaning from combinations of simpler constituents. This property is considered to be the hallmark of human language as it enables the ability to express novel concepts and ease of learning. As such, numerous studies in the emergent communication field explore the prerequisite conditions for emergence of compositionality. Most of these studies set out one-to-one communication environment wherein a speaker interacts with one listener during a single round of communication game. However, real-world communications often involve multiple listeners; their interests may vary and they may even need to coordinate among themselves to be successful at a given task. This work investigates the effects of one-to-many communication environment on emergent languages where a single speaker broadcasts its message to multiple listeners to cooperatively solve a task. We observe that simply broadcasting the speaker's message to multiple listeners does not induce more compositional languages. We then analyze two axes of environmental pressures that facilitate emergence of compositionality: listeners of *different interests* and *coordination* among listeners.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: Machine Learning for NLP
Research Area Keywords: Emergent Communication, Multi-Agent Communication, Language Emergence, Compositionality, Emergent Language, One-to-Many Communication
Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Approaches to low-resource settings
Languages Studied: Emergent languages
Submission Number: 3255
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