Related papers: Learning in the Rational Speech Acts Model
A hallmark of human language is the ability to effectively and efficiently convey contextually relevant information. One theory for how humans reason about language is presented in the Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework, which captures…
As AI systems take on collaborative roles, they must reason about shared goals and beliefs-not just generate fluent language. The Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework offers a principled approach to pragmatic reasoning, but existing…
This paper focuses on a referring expression generation (REG) task in which the aim is to pick out an object in a complex visual scene. One common theoretical approach to this problem is to model the task as a two-agent cooperative scheme…
What computational principles underlie human pragmatic reasoning? A prominent approach to pragmatics is the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework, which formulates pragmatic reasoning as probabilistic speakers and listeners recursively…
Figurative language (e.g., irony, hyperbole, understatement) is ubiquitous in human communication, resulting in utterances where the literal and the intended meanings do not match. The Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework, which explicitly…
The Rational Speech Act (RSA) model provides a flexible framework to model pragmatic reasoning in computational terms. However, state-of-the-art RSA models are still fairly distant from modern machine learning techniques and present a…
Current sparse neural information retrieval (IR) methods, and to a lesser extent more traditional models such as BM25, do not take into account the document collection and the complex interplay between different term weights when…
Models of context-sensitive communication often use the Rational Speech Act framework (RSA; Frank & Goodman, 2012), which formulates listeners and speakers in a cooperative reasoning process. However, the standard RSA formulation can only…
Large language models (LLMs) are trained on data assumed to include natural language pragmatics, but do they actually behave like pragmatic speakers? We attempt to answer this question using the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework, which…
In this work we introduce a structured signaling game, an extension of the classical signaling game with a similarity structure between meanings in the context, along with a variant of the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework which we call…
We combine a neural image captioner with a Rational Speech Acts (RSA) model to make a system that is pragmatically informative: its objective is to produce captions that are not merely true but also distinguish their inputs from similar…
Representational Similarity Analysis (RSA) is a technique developed by neuroscientists for comparing activity patterns of different measurement modalities (e.g., fMRI, electrophysiology, behavior). As a framework, RSA has several advantages…
Human communication is a collaborative process. Speakers, on top of conveying their own intent, adjust the content and language expressions by taking the listeners into account, including their knowledge background, personalities, and…
Recent advances in computational cognitive science (i.e., simulation-based probabilistic programs) have paved the way for significant progress in formal, implementable models of pragmatics. Rather than describing a pragmatic reasoning…
The usage of Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework has been successful in building \emph{pragmatic} program synthesizers that return programs which, in addition to being logically consistent with user-generated examples, account for the fact…
Language use is shaped by pragmatics -- i.e., reasoning about communicative goals and norms in context. As language models (LMs) are increasingly used as conversational agents, it becomes ever more important to understand their pragmatic…
Despite significant advancements in natural language generation, controlling language models to produce texts with desired attributes remains a formidable challenge. In this work, we introduce RSA-Control, a training-free controllable text…
We develop a behavioural theory of reflective sequential algorithms (RSAs), i.e. sequential algorithms that can modify their own behaviour. The theory comprises a set of language-independent postulates defining the class of RSAs, an…
Human languages expand vocabularies by combining existing morphemes rather than inventing arbitrary forms. Communicative efficiency shapes lexical systems at multiple levels (Gibson et al., 2019), yet morphological composition -- combining…
Why is ordinary language vague? We argue that in contexts in which a cooperative speaker is not perfectly informed about the world, the use of vague expressions can offer an optimal tradeoff between truthfulness (Gricean Quality) and…