# Measuring non-trivial compositionality in emergent communication

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2010.15058 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.15058/

## Key facts

- Cited by 10 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- First posted on arXiv 28 Oct 2020.

## Built on by (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [A Review of the Applications of Deep Learning-Based Emergent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.03302/) (2024)
- [Towards More Human-like AI Communication: A Review of Emergent Communication Research](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2308.02541/) (2023)
- [Catalytic Role Of Noise And Necessity Of Inductive Biases In The Emergence Of Compositional Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.06464/) (2021)
- [The Five Ws of Multi-Agent Communication: Who Talks to Whom, When, What, and Why -- A Survey from MARL to Emergent Language and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.11583/) (2026)
- [Recursive Neural Networks with Bottlenecks Diagnose (Non-)Compositionality](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.13714/) (2023)
- [Speaking Your Language: Spatial Relationships in Interpretable Emergent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.07277/) (2024)
- [Models of symbol emergence in communication: a conceptual review and a guide for avoiding local minima](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.04544/) (2023)
- [Semantics and Spatiality of Emergent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.10173/) (2024)
- [Discovering Properties of Inflectional Morphology in Neural Emergent Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.05843/) (2025)
- [Morpheme Induction for Emergent Language](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2510.03439/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Compositionality is an important explanatory target in emergent communication and language evolution. The vast majority of computational models of communication account for the emergence of only a very basic form of compositionality: trivial compositionality. A compositional protocol is trivially compositional if the meaning of a complex signal (e.g. blue circle) boils down to the intersection of meanings of its constituents (e.g. the intersection of the set of blue objects and the set of circles). A protocol is non-trivially compositional (NTC) if the meaning of a complex signal (e.g. biggest apple) is a more complex function of the meanings of their constituents. In this paper, we review several metrics of compositionality used in emergent communication and experimentally show that most of them fail to detect NTC - i.e. they treat non-trivial compositionality as a failure of compositionality. The one exception is tree reconstruction error, a metric motivated by formal accounts of compositionality. These results emphasise important limitations of emergent communication research that could hamper progress on modelling the emergence of NTC.