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Anaphoric Structure Emerges Between Neural Networks (arxiv.org)
3 points by PaulHoule on Aug 21, 2023 | hide | past | pdf | 1 comment on HN

In plain words: Two neural networks trained to talk to each other were watched to see whether they would invent shortcuts like pronouns that depend on context. These shortcuts appeared on their own and grew more common when the speaker was pushed to keep messages short.

Abstract

Pragmatics is core to natural language, enabling speakers to communicate efficiently with structures like ellipsis and anaphora that can shorten utterances without loss of meaning. These structures require a listener to interpret an ambiguous form - like a pronoun - and infer the speaker's intended meaning - who that pronoun refers to. Despite potential to introduce ambiguity, anaphora is ubiquitous across human language. In an effort to better understand the origins of anaphoric structure in natural language, we look to see if analogous structures can emerge between artificial neural networks trained to solve a communicative task. We show that: first, despite the potential for increased ambiguity, languages with anaphoric structures are learnable by neural models. Second, anaphoric structures emerge between models 'naturally' without need for additional constraints. Finally, introducing an explicit efficiency pressure on the speaker increases the prevalence of these structures. We conclude that certain pragmatic structures straightforwardly emerge between neural networks, without explicit efficiency pressures, but that the competing needs of speakers and listeners conditions the degree and nature of their emergence.

Nicholas Edwards, Hannah Rohde, Henry Conklin
arXiv:2308.07984 · cs.CL · submitted Aug 15, 2023
abstract · pdf · html · Published as a conference paper at the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 2023: 6 Pages, 3 Figures, code available at https://github.com/hcoxec/emerge

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Contextually, use of <this> and <that> as indicators of prior denoted subject and object, even in nested contexts makes a lot of sense. Speech without them would be incredibly stilted (which points in english to how normal it is. There. I just used one. "it" meaning... ), worse than police statements. But, just as highly stilted english is common in legal documents, the explicit ambiguity of "this" and "that" comes to the fore in problems: WHICH "this" was it referring to?

I find that when I see code with <self> in it, I have a frisson. Which <self> or <this> is it? Oh, there can only be one?

I am less sure "emerges" is a word I want to see here. The implicit meaning of "nobody put it there" worries me. Some structural phenomena made it sensible to use local variable references back to priors, "in the stack" so to speak. What that was, explicit or implicit, is good to study for sure.