18 June 2024, Language Evolution and Learning (LELA), Polina Tsvilodub

Imagine you are working as a barista at a coffeeshop. A customer asks a polar question like “Do you have iced tea?” but you've run out. In this situation, you might likely provide an overinformative answer going beyond a simple “yes” or “no” (e.g., “No, but we've got iced coffee!”), but what principles guide the selection of additional information? This talk proposes that such answers draw on learning about our interlocutors from language; they present a non-trivial instance of pragmatic communication which depends for complex reasoning drawing on these inferences about the interlocutors and world knowledge. The talk will feature a combination of Bayesian pragmatic models and LLM results.