{"about":{"site":"https://codewithpapers.app","non_affiliation":"Code with Papers and Syntology are not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Papers with Code, Meta, or the pwc-archive mirror.","licence":"CC BY-SA 4.0","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","attribution":"https://codewithpapers.app/attribution","modified":"archive material modified by Syntology; see the attribution page"},"url":"/paper/natural-language-does-not-emerge-anaturallya","title":"Natural Language Does Not Emerge `Naturally' in Multi-Agent Dialog","arxiv_id":null,"date":"2017-09-01","proceeding":"EMNLP 2017 9","authors":["Satwik Kottur","Jos{\\'e} Moura","Stefan Lee","Dhruv Batra"],"abstract":"A number of recent works have proposed techniques for end-to-end learning of communication protocols among cooperative multi-agent populations, and have simultaneously found the emergence of grounded human-interpretable language in the protocols developed by the agents, learned without any human supervision! In this paper, using a Task {\\&} Talk reference game between two agents as a testbed, we present a sequence of {`}negative{'} results culminating in a {`}positive{'} one {--} showing that while most agent-invented languages are effective (i.e. achieve near-perfect task rewards), they are decidedly not interpretable or compositional. In essence, we find that natural language does not emerge {`}naturally{'},despite the semblance of ease of natural-language-emergence that one may gather from recent literature. We discuss how it is possible to coax the invented languages to become more and more human-like and compositional by increasing restrictions on how two agents may communicate.","url_abs":"https://aclanthology.org/D17-1321","url_pdf":"https://aclanthology.org/D17-1321.pdf","source":{"archive":"pwc-archive (Hugging Face), CC BY-SA 4.0","snapshot":"2025-07-28","licence_url":"https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/legalcode","row_kind":"abstracts"},"code_links":[{"paper_slug":"natural-language-does-not-emerge-anaturallya","repo_url":"https://github.com/batra-mlp-lab/lang-emerge","is_official":1,"mentioned_in_paper":1,"mentioned_in_github":0,"framework":"pytorch","reach":{"status":"unanswered"}}],"tasks":[{"task_slug":"slot-filling","task_name":"Slot Filling"}],"methods":[],"datasets_introduced":[],"methods_introduced":[],"results":[],"syntology":{"atlas_url":null,"mcp":null,"developers":"https://syntology.ai/developers"},"arxiv_metadata":null,"syntology_extracted_results":null}