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When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to "overinformative" referring expressions
Judith Degen1, Robert D Hawkins1, Caroline Graf2
1Department of Psychology, Stanford University.
Speakers rationally balance utterance costs and information, explaining why referring expressions are often redundant rather than overinformative. This model captures various overmodification phenomena in language use.
Area of Science:
- Cognitive Science
- Linguistics
- Psychology
Background:
- Referring expressions are fundamental to language use.
- Traditional models struggle to explain overinformativeness in referring expressions.
- Existing theories face challenges in accounting for seemingly irrational linguistic choices.
Purpose of the Study:
- To develop a novel production model for referring expressions.
- To integrate cost-informativeness trade-offs within the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework.
- To explain phenomena like overmodification using a new semantic approach.
Main Methods:
- Proposed a production model for referring expressions.
- Utilized the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework.
- Introduced a nondeterministic continuous semantics, relaxing deterministic Boolean semantics.
Main Results:
- The model explains the asymmetry in overmodification (color vs. size).
- It accounts for increased overmodification in complex scenes and with atypical features.
- It captures the relationship between typicality and specificity in nominal reference.
Conclusions:
- Referring expressions are not wastefully overinformative but usefully redundant.
- The novel semantic approach unifies disparate phenomena in language production.
- This framework offers a more nuanced understanding of rational language use.
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