Disentangling contributions of visual information and interaction history in the formation of graphical conventions

Pragmatic Issue-Sensitive Image Captioning

EMNLP Findings'20, 2020. [All Versions]. Application of Rational Speech Act to Image Captioning

Pragmatic Reasoning through Semantic Inference

Semantics & Pragmatics, 2016. [All Versions]

Pragmatic Language Interpretation as Probabilistic Inference

Trends in Cognitive Sciences, 2016. [All Versions]. Understanding language requires more than the use of fixed conventions and more than decoding combinatorial structure. Instead, comprehenders make exquisitely sensitive inferences about what utterances mean given their knowledge of the speaker, language, and context. Building on developments in game theory and probabilistic modeling, the authors describe the rational speech act (RSA) framework for pragmatic reasoning. RSA models provide a principled way to formalize inferences about meaning in context; they have been used to make successful quantitative predictions about human behavior in a variety of different tasks and situations, and they explain why complex phenomena, such as hyperbole and vagueness, occur. More generally, they provide a computational framework for integrating linguistic structure, world knowledge, and context in pragmatic language understanding

Social Pragmatics: Preschoolers Rely on Commonsense Psychology to Resolve Referential Underspecification

Child Development, 2019. [All Versions]. A piece of evidence for children's capability on social pragmatics