Communication is one of the most impressive human abilities. The question of how communication arises has been studied for many decades, if not centuries. However, due to the computational and representational limitations, in the past problem-settings had to be restricted to low dimensional, simple observation spaces. With the rise of deep reinforcement learning methods, this question can now be studied in complex multi-agent settings, which has lead to flourishing activity in the area over the last two years. In these settings agents can learn to communicate in grounded multi-modal environments and rich communication protocols emerge.

However, the recent research has been largely disconnected from the study of emergent communication in other fields and even from work done on this topic in previous decades. This workshop will provide a forum for a variety of researchers from different fields (machine learning, game-theory, linguistics, cognitive science, and programming languages) interested in the question of communication and emergent language to exchange ideas.

https://sites.google.com/site/emecom2017/