---
title: "The Origins of Syntax in Visually Grounded Robotic Agents"
authors:
  - "Luc Steels"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/236"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1997/0236.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1997
pages: "1632-1640"
track: "Invited Speakers"
keywords:
---

# The Origins of Syntax in Visually Grounded Robotic Agents

Luc Steels

*Proceedings of the Fifteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 1632-1640.

## Abstract

The pap er proposes a set of principl es and a general architecture that may explain how language and meaning may originate and complexify in a group of physically grounded distributed agents. An experimental setup is introduced for concretising and validating specific mechanisms based on these principles. Th e setup consists of two robotic heads that watch a scene in which a robot moves around in its ecosystem. The first r es ults from experiments showing the emergence of distinctions, of a lexicon, and of primitive syntactic structures are reported.