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In the quest to give a formal compositional semantics to natural languages, semanticists have started turning their attention to phenomena that have been also considered as parts of pragmatics (e.g., discourse anaphora and presupposition…
Languages vary widely in how meanings map to word forms. These mappings have been found to support efficient communication; however, this theory does not account for systematic relations within word forms. We examine how a restricted set of…
We study the influence of context on sentence acceptability. First we compare the acceptability ratings of sentences judged in isolation, with a relevant context, and with an irrelevant context. Our results show that context induces a…
Goal-oriented conversational agents are becoming prevalent in our daily lives. For these systems to engage users and achieve their goals, they need to exhibit appropriate social behavior as well as provide informative replies that guide…
Bayesian networks provide a probabilistic semantics for qualitative assertions about likelihood. A qualitative reasoner based on an algebra over these assertions can derive further conclusions about the influence of actions. While the…
The majority of research in computational psycholinguistics has concentrated on the processing of words. This study introduces innovative methods for computing sentence-level metrics using multilingual large language models. The metrics…
Modern dialog managers face the challenge of having to fulfill human-level conversational skills as part of common user expectations, including but not limited to discourse with no clear objective. Along with these requirements, agents are…
Recognizing sarcasm often requires a deep understanding of multiple sources of information, including the utterance, the conversational context, and real world facts. Most of the current sarcasm detection systems consider only the utterance…
The complex organization of syntax in hierarchical structures is one of the core design features of human language. Duality of patterning refers for instance to the organization of the meaningful elements in a language at two distinct…
We consider the distinction between intended and perceived sarcasm in the context of textual sarcasm detection. The former occurs when an utterance is sarcastic from the perspective of its author, while the latter occurs when the utterance…
The article describes a model of automatic analysis of puns, where a word is intentionally used in two meanings at the same time (the target word). We employ Roget's Thesaurus to discover two groups of words which, in a pun, form around two…
Recent debates over adults' theory of mind use have been fueled by surprising failures of perspective-taking in communication, suggesting that perspective-taking can be relatively effortful. How, then, should speakers and listeners allocate…
This paper is an original attempt to understand the foundations of economic reasoning. It endeavors to rigorously define the relationship between subjective interpretations and objective valuations of such interpretations in the context of…
Heuristics and cognitive biases are an integral part of human decision-making. Automatically detecting a particular cognitive bias could enable intelligent tools to provide better decision-support. Detecting the presence of a cognitive bias…
We investigate a new setting for foreign language learning, where learners infer the meaning of unfamiliar words in a multimodal context of a sentence describing a paired image. We conduct studies with human participants using different…
In social systems, meaning can be communicated in addition to underlying processes of the information exchange. Meaning processing incurs on information processing with hindsight, while information processing recursively follows the time…
While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to pragmatic…
The iterated learning model is an agent model which simulates the transmission of of language from generation to generation. It is used to study how the language adapts to pressures imposed by transmission. In each iteration, a language…
The sociological domain is different from the psychological one insofar as meaning can be communicated at the supra-individual level (Schutz, 1932; Luhmann, 1984). The computation of anticipatory systems enables us to distinguish between…
Sarcasm is a pragmatic phenomenon in which speakers convey meanings that diverge from literal content, relying on an interaction between semantics and prosodic expression. However, how these cues jointly contribute to the recognition of…