Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

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.