scholarly journals The social basis of referential communication: Speakers construct reference based on listeners' expected visual search.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Jara-Ettinger ◽  
Paula Rubio-Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Referential Communication ◽  
Production Costs ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Social Basis ◽  
Quantitative Accuracy ◽  
Referential Expressions ◽  
Acceptability Judgments

A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers should say as much as necessary, but no more. In referential communication, the pressure to be efficient is typically formalized as an egocentric bias where speakers aim to minimize production costs. While intuitive, this view has failed to explain why people routinely produce redundant adjectives, particularly color words, or why this phenomenon varies cross-linguistically. Here we propose an alternative view of referential efficiency, whereby speakers create referential expressions designed to facilitate the listener's visual search for the referent as they process words in real time. We present a computational model of our account, the Incremental Communicative Efficiency (ICE) model, which generates referential expressions by considering listeners' expected visual search during online language processing. Our model captures a number of known effects in the literature, including cross-linguistic differences in speakers' propensity to over-specify. Moreover, our model predicts graded acceptability judgments with quantitative accuracy, systematically outperforming an alternative, brevity-based model. Our findings suggest that reference production is best understood as driven by a cooperative goal to help the listener identify the intended referent, rather than by an egocentric effort to minimize utterance length.

Speakers construct reference based on listeners’ expected visual search

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Julian Jara-Ettinger ◽  
Paula Rubio-Fernandez
Keyword(s):  
Visual Search ◽  
Computational Model ◽  
Referential Communication ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Quantitative Accuracy ◽  
Utterance Length ◽  
Acceptability Judgments

A foundational assumption of human communication is that speakers ought to say as much as necessary, but no more. How speakers determine what is necessary in a given context, however, is unclear. In studies of referential communication, this expectation is often formalized as the idea that speakers should construct reference by selecting the shortest, sufficiently informative, description. Here we propose that reference production is, instead, a process whereby speakers adopt listeners’ perspectives to facilitate their visual search, without concern for utterance length. We show that a computational model of our proposal predicts graded acceptability judgments with quantitative accuracy, systematically outperforming brevity models. Our model also explains crosslinguistic differences in speakers’ propensity to over-specify in different visual contexts. Our findings suggest that reference production is best understood as driven by a cooperative goal to help the listener understand the intended message, rather than by an egocentric effort to minimize utterance length.

scholarly journals Real-time pragmatic inference across cultures: evidence from a non-industrialized society

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Anna Ryskin ◽  
Miguel Angel Salinas ◽  
Steven T. Piantadosi ◽  
Edward Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Real Time ◽  
Formal Education ◽  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Visual Display ◽  
Referential Communication ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Pragmatic Inference ◽  
Communication Task ◽  
Patterns Of Behavior ◽  
Referential Expressions

Speakers and listeners are thought to routinely make sophisticated inferences, in real time, about their conversation partner’s knowledge state and communicative intentions. However, these inferences have only been studied in industrialized cultures. Communicative expectations may be language-dependent, as are many phonological, syntactic, and semantic aspects of language. We study pragmatic inference in communication in the Tsimane’, an indigenous people of the Bolivian Amazon, who have little contact with industrialization or formal education. Using a referential communication task and eye-tracking, we probe how Tsimane' speakers use and understand referential expressions (e.g., ``Hand me the cup.'') across contexts. We manipulated aspects of the visual display to elicit contrastive inferences, including whether the referent was unique or part of a set as well as whether members of the same set differed in size or color. Strikingly, in all cases, patterns of behavior and eye-gaze of Tsimane' and English speakers were qualitatively identical, suggesting that real-time inference may be a core feature of human communication that is shared across cultures rather than a product of life in an industrialized society.

Partner-Specific Communication Deficits in Individuals With Alzheimer's Disease

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-15
Author(s):  
Eun Jin Paek ◽  
Si On Yoon
Keyword(s):  
Alzheimer’S Disease ◽  
Older Adults ◽  
Alzheimer's Disease ◽  
Referential Communication ◽  
Sorting Task ◽  
Audience Design ◽  
Healthy Older Adults ◽  
Communication Task ◽  
Design Skills ◽  
Referential Expressions

Purpose Speakers adjust referential expressions to the listeners' knowledge while communicating, a phenomenon called “audience design.” While individuals with Alzheimer's disease (AD) show difficulties in discourse production, it is unclear whether they exhibit preserved partner-specific audience design. The current study examined if individuals with AD demonstrate partner-specific audience design skills. Method Ten adults with mild-to-moderate AD and 12 healthy older adults performed a referential communication task with two experimenters (E1 and E2). At first, E1 and participants completed an image-sorting task, allowing them to establish shared labels. Then, during testing, both experimenters were present in the room, and participants described images to either E1 or E2 (randomly alternating). Analyses focused on the number of words participants used to describe each image and whether they reused shared labels. Results During testing, participants in both groups produced shorter descriptions when describing familiar images versus new images, demonstrating their ability to learn novel knowledge. When they described familiar images, healthy older adults modified their expressions depending on the current partner's knowledge, producing shorter expressions and more established labels for the knowledgeable partner (E1) versus the naïve partner (E2), but individuals with AD were less likely to do so. Conclusions The current study revealed that both individuals with AD and the control participants were able to acquire novel knowledge, but individuals with AD tended not to flexibly adjust expressions depending on the partner's knowledge state. Conversational inefficiency and difficulties observed in AD may, in part, stem from disrupted audience design skills.

scholarly journals Reference without anaphora: on agency through grammar

Linguistics ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Chase Wesley Raymond ◽  
Rebecca Clift ◽  
John Heritage
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Noun Phrase ◽  
Naturally Occurring ◽  
Subsequent Reference ◽  
Normative Dimension ◽  
Referential Expressions ◽  
Deontic Authority

Abstract In this article, we investigate a puzzle for standard accounts of reference in natural language processing, psycholinguistics and pragmatics: occasions where, following an initial reference (e.g., the ice), a subsequent reference is achieved using the same noun phrase (i.e., the ice), as opposed to an anaphoric form (i.e., it). We argue that such non-anaphoric reference can be understood as motivated by a central principle: the expression of agency in interaction. In developing this claim, we draw upon research in what may initially appear a wholly unconnected domain: the marking of epistemic and deontic stance, standardly investigated in linguistics as turn-level grammatical phenomena. Examination of naturally-occurring talk reveals that to analyze such stances solely though the lens of turn-level resources (e.g., modals) is to address only partially the means by which participants make epistemic and deontic claims in everyday discourse. Speakers’ use of referential expressions illustrates a normative dimension of grammar that incorporates both form and position, thereby affording speakers the ability to actively depart from this form-position norm through the use of a repeated NP, a grammatical practice that we show is associated with the expression of epistemic and deontic authority. It is argued that interactants can thus be seen to be agentively mobilizing the resources of grammar to accommodate the inescapable temporality of interaction.

scholarly journals Beyond robotic speech: mutual benefits to cognitive psychology and artificial intelligence from the study of multimodal communication

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beata Grzyb ◽  
Gabriella Vigliocco
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Cognitive Psychology ◽  
Language Learning ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Computational Models ◽  
Eye Gaze ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Embodied Agents ◽  
Human Machine Interaction ◽  
Neural Underpinnings

Language has predominately been studied as a unimodal phenomenon - as speech or text without much consideration of its physical and social context – this is true both in cognitive psychology/psycholinguistics as well as in artificial intelligence. However, in everyday life, language is most often used in face-to-face communication and in addition to structured speech it comprises a dynamic system of multiplex components such as gestures, eye gaze, mouth movements and prosodic modulation. Recently, cognitive scientists have started to realise the potential importance of multimodality for the understanding of human communication and its neural underpinnings; while AI scientists have begun to address how to integrate multimodality in order to improve communication between human and artificial embodied agent. We review here the existing literature on multimodal language learning and processing in humans and the literature on perception of artificial agents, their comprehension and production of multimodal cues and we discuss their main limitations. We conclude by arguing that by joining forces AI scientists can improve the effectiveness of human-machine interaction and increase the human-likeness and acceptance of embodied agents in society. In turn, computational models that generate language in artificial embodied agents constitute a unique research tool to investigate the underlying mechanisms that govern language processing and learning in humans.

"Units of Meaning" in Medical Documents: A Natural Language Processing Perspective

2014 ◽  
Vol 08 (03) ◽  
pp. 249-255
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Barr ◽  
Dimitri Popolov
Keyword(s):  
Natural Language Processing ◽  
Natural Language ◽  
Language Processing ◽  
Free Form ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Departure Point ◽  
Complicated System ◽  
Laboratory Results ◽  
Medical Documents

This paper discusses principles for the design of natural language processing (NLP) systems to automatically extract data from doctor's notes, laboratory results and other medical documents in free-form text. We argue that rather than searching for "atom units of meaning" in the text and then trying to generalize them into a broader set of documents through increasingly complicated system of rules, an NLP practitioner should take concepts as a whole and as a meaningful unit of text. This simplifies the rules and makes NLP system easier to maintain and adapt. The departure point is purely practical; however, a deeper investigation of typical problems with the implementation of such systems leads us to a discussion of broader linguistic theories underlying the NLP practices, such as metaphors theories and models of human communication.

Linguistic intuitions again

2020 ◽  
pp. 51-68
Author(s):  
Michael Devitt
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Good Evidence ◽  
Linguistic Competence ◽  
Alternative View ◽  
Central Processor ◽  
Empirical Theory ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Structural Descriptions ◽  
Semantic Properties ◽  
Linguistic Intuitions

Linguistics takes speakers’ intuitions about the syntactic and semantic properties of their language as good evidence for a theory of that language. Why are these intuitions good evidence? The received Chomskyan answer is that they are the product of an underlying linguistic competence. In Devitt’s Ignorance of Language, this Voice of Competence answer (VoC) was criticized and an alternative view, according to which intuitions are empirical theory-laden central-processor responses to phenomena, was defended. After summarizing this position, the chapter responds to Steven Gross and Georges Rey, who defend VoC. It argues that they have not provided the sort of empirically based details that make VoC worth pursuing. In doing so, it emphasizes two distinctions: (1) between the intuitive behavior of language processing and the intuitive judgments that are the subject of VoC; and (2) between the possible roles of structural descriptions in language processing and in providing intuitions.

scholarly journals Multimodal Language Processing in Human Communication

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (8) ◽  
pp. 639-652 ◽  
Author(s):  
Judith Holler ◽  
Stephen C. Levinson
Keyword(s):  
Language Processing ◽  
Human Communication ◽  
Multimodal Language
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