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We present a series of studies investigating the formation, generative power, and evolution of toponyms (i.e. topographic names). The domain chosen for this project is the spatial concepts related to places in an environment, one of the key sets of concepts to be grounded in autonomous agents. Concepts for places cannot be directly perceived as they require knowledge of relationships between locations in space, with representations inferred from ambiguous sensory data acquired through exploration. A generative toponymic language game has been developed to allow the agents to interact, forming concepts for locations and spatial relations. The studies demonstrate how a grounded generative toponymic language can form and evolve in a population of agents interacting through language games. Initially, terms are grounded in simple spatial concepts directly experienced by the agents. A generative process then enables the agents to learn about and refer to locations beyond their direct experience, enabling concepts and toponyms to co-evolve. The significance of this research is the demonstration of grounding for both experienced and novel concepts, using a generative process, applied to spatial locations.

Concepts maps are a useful method for visualizing how concepts are associated within a domain. Automated tools can extract the key concepts from a corpus and display their relationships in a two-dimensional representation. However, it may be difficult to quickly perceive the overall structure of a concept map. The aim of this research is to provide a framework on a concept map to identify primary concepts and nearby, related concepts providing context for them using network graph techniques. Automated concept maps are usually very highly connected, and full connectivity shows none of the detail or fine structure. Minimum spanning trees based on the strength of the co-occurrence frequency between concepts and their relative distances on the twodimensional concept map show hierarchical structure, with key concepts acting as hubs within the network structure. The links within the minimum spanning tree can be used to associate concepts that are not directly connected. 13th International Conference Information Visualisation978-0-7695-3733-7/09 $25.00