From Abstractions to "Natural Languages" for Planning Agents
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Despite our unique ability to use natural languages, we know little about their origins like how they are created and evolved. The answer lies deeply in the evolution of our cognitive and social abilities over a very long period of time which is beyond our scrutiny. Existing studies on the origin of languages are often focused on the emergence of specific language features (such as recursion) without supporting a comprehensive view. Investigation of restricted language representations, such as temporal logic, unfortunately does not reveal much about the impetus underlying language formation and evolution, since much of their construction is based on natural languages themselves. In this paper, we investigate the origin of "natural languages" in a restricted setting involving only planning agents. Similar to a common view that considers languages as a tool for grounding symbols to semantic meanings, we take the view that a language for planning agents is a tool for grounding symbols to physical configurations. From this perspective, a language is used by the agents to coordinate their behaviors during planning. With a few assumptions, we show that language is closely connected to a type of domain abstractions, based on which a language can be constructed. We study how such abstractions can be identified and discuss how to use them during planning. We apply our method to several domains, discuss the results, and relaxation of the assumptions made.
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