---
title: "Situated Grounded Word Semantics"
authors:
  - "Luc Steels"
  - "Frédéric Kaplan"
doi: ""
url: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/123"
pdf: "https://ijcai.org/proceedings/1999/0123.pdf"
venue: "Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence"
year: 1999
pages: "862-866"
track: "Natural Language Processing"
keywords:
---

# Situated Grounded Word Semantics

Luc Steels, Frédéric Kaplan

*Proceedings of the Sixteenth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence*, pages 862-866.

## Abstract

The paper repo rts on experim ents in which autonomous visually grounded agents bootstrap an ontology and a shared lexicon without prior design nor other forms of human intervention. The agents do so while playing a particular language game called the guessing game. We show that synonymy and polyse my arise as emergent properties in the language but also that there are tendencies to damp en it so as to mak e the lang ua ge more coherent and thus more optimal from the viewpoints of comm uni cat iv e success, cog ni t iv e co mpl exity, and l earnab ility.