On Temporal References in Emergent Communication
Olaf Lipinski Adam J. Sobey Federico Cerutti Timothy J. Norman
As humans, we use linguistic elements referencing time, such as before or
tomorrow, to easily share past experiences and future predictions. While
temporal aspects of the language have been considered in computational
linguistics, no such exploration has been done within the field of emergent
communication. We research this gap, providing the first reported temporal
vocabulary within emergent communication literature. Our experimental analysis
shows that a different agent architecture is sufficient for the natural
emergence of temporal references, and that no additional losses are necessary.
Our readily transferable architectural insights provide the basis for the
incorporation of temporal referencing into other emergent communication
environments.