# The Grammar of Emergent Languages

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.02069 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.02069/

## Key facts

- Cited by 9 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 5 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Emergent Communication of Generalizations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2106.02668/) (2021)
- [A Review of the Applications of Deep Learning-Based Emergent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03302/) (2024)
- [Emergent Language: A Survey and Taxonomy](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2409.02645/) (2024)
- [Lewis's Signaling Game as beta-VAE For Natural Word Lengths and Segments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04453/) (2023)
- [Emergence of hierarchical reference systems in multi-agent communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.13176/) (2022)
- [Towards Interactive Language Modeling](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.11911/) (2021)
- [ELCC: the Emergent Language Corpus Collection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.04158/) (2024)
- [Bidirectional Emergent Language in Situated Environments](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14649/) (2024)
- [Morpheme Induction for Emergent Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03439/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this paper, we consider the syntactic properties of languages emerged in referential games, using unsupervised grammar induction (UGI) techniques originally designed to analyse natural language. We show that the considered UGI techniques are appropriate to analyse emergent languages and we then study if the languages that emerge in a typical referential game setup exhibit syntactic structure, and to what extent this depends on the maximum message length and number of symbols that the agents are allowed to use. Our experiments demonstrate that a certain message length and vocabulary size are required for structure to emerge, but they also illustrate that more sophisticated game scenarios are required to obtain syntactic properties more akin to those observed in human language. We argue that UGI techniques should be part of the standard toolkit for analysing emergent languages and release a comprehensive library to facilitate such analysis for future researchers.