Adding to @Matthew & @ Mariya’s conversation, I thought this talk from Percy Liang was pretty interesting
There’s a lot of preface, but the experiment was interesting. Based on the idea that language is based on the need to motivate an action in the world, Stanford NLP researchers built a game where players (mechanical turk workers) have to come up with language to move virtual blocks to recreate a given pattern. The game does not have language, so players train the game using their own language–whether English, Polish, or even Polish Notation). The game aggregates the common words given by the players to create a working body of language.