Effective communication requires the ability to refer to specific parts of an observation in relation to others. While emergent communication literature shows success in developing various language properties, no research has shown the emergence of such positional references. This paper demonstrates how agents can communicate about spatial relationships within their observations. The results indicate that agents can develop a language capable of expressing the relationships between parts of their observation, achieving over 90% accuracy when trained in a referential game which requires such communication. Using a collocation measure, we demonstrate how the agents create such references. This analysis suggests that agents use a mixture of non-compositional and compositional messages to convey spatial relationships. We also show that the emergent language is interpretable by humans. The translation accuracy is tested by communicating with the receiver agent, where the receiver achieves over 78% accuracy using parts of this lexicon, confirming that the interpretation of the emergent language was successful.

翻译：有效的通信需要能够参照观察中特定部分与其他部分的关系。尽管涌现通信研究已成功发展出多种语言特性，但尚无研究展示此类位置参照的涌现。本文论证了智能体如何就其观察中的空间关系进行通信。结果表明，智能体能够发展出表达观察各部分关系的语言，在需要此类通信的指称游戏中训练后达到超过90%的准确率。通过搭配度量方法，我们揭示了智能体如何创建此类参照。分析表明，智能体采用非组合性与组合性消息混合的策略来传达空间关系。我们还证明该涌现语言具有人类可解释性。通过接收方智能体的通信测试，使用该词典部分词汇时接收方达到超过78%的准确率，证实了对涌现语言的解读是成功的。