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Author
S. Pauw
J. Hilferty
Year
2012
Title
The Emergence of Quantifiers
Book title
Experiments in cultural language evolution
Pages (from-to)
277-304
Publisher
Amsterdam: John Benjamins
ISBN
9789027204561
Serie
Advances in interaction studies
Volume | Edition (Serie)
3
Document type
Chapter
Faculty
Interfacultary Research Institutes
Institute
Institute for Logic, Language and Computation (ILLC)
Abstract
Human natural languages use quantifiers as ways to designate the number of objects of a set. They include numerals, such as "three", or circumscriptions, such as "a few". The latter are not only underdetermined but also context dependent. We provide a cultural-evolution explanation for the emergence of such quantifiers, focusing in particular on the role of environmental constraints on strategy choices. Through a series of situated interaction experiments, we show how a community of robotic agents can self-organize a quantification system. Different perceptions of the scene make underdetermined quantifiers useful and environments in which the distribution of objects exhibits some degree of predictability creates favorable conditions for context-dependent quantifiers.
Language
English
Permalink
http://hdl.handle.net/11245/1.370734

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