Why would a robot make use of pronouns? An evolutionary investigation of the emergence of pronominal anaphora

Abstract

We investigate whether and in what conditions pronominal anaphora could be acquired by intelligent agents as a means to express recently mentioned entities. The use of pronouns is conditioned by the existence of a memory recording the object previously in focus. The approach follows an evolutionary paradigm of language acquisition. Experiments show that pronouns can be easily included in a vocabulary of a community of 10 agents dialoguing on a static scene and that, generally, they enhance the communication success. © 2009 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg.