TY - GEN
T1 - Adapting to a listener with incomplete lexical semantics
AU - Srinivas, Sadhwi
AU - Landau, Barbara
AU - Wilson, Colin
N1 - Publisher Copyright:
© CogSci 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Speakers involved in a communicative exchange construct an internal model of their addressees and draw upon the model to craft utterances that are likely to be understood. In many real-world situations (e.g., when talking to a non-expert, non-native speaker, or a child), this process of audience design involves identifying gaps in the lexical-semantic knowledge of the listener and selecting alternative expressions. We examine speaker adaptation to a listener with incomplete lexical knowledge in the spatial domain, specifically a failure to comprehend the basic terms left/right. Experimental and modeling results provide evidence of rapid adaptation that is modulated by the availability of alternative spatial terms. We consider how our approach relates to recent work in computational pragmatics, and suggest that adaptation to the lexical knowledge of the addressee is an important but relatively understudied topic for future research.
AB - Speakers involved in a communicative exchange construct an internal model of their addressees and draw upon the model to craft utterances that are likely to be understood. In many real-world situations (e.g., when talking to a non-expert, non-native speaker, or a child), this process of audience design involves identifying gaps in the lexical-semantic knowledge of the listener and selecting alternative expressions. We examine speaker adaptation to a listener with incomplete lexical knowledge in the spatial domain, specifically a failure to comprehend the basic terms left/right. Experimental and modeling results provide evidence of rapid adaptation that is modulated by the availability of alternative spatial terms. We consider how our approach relates to recent work in computational pragmatics, and suggest that adaptation to the lexical knowledge of the addressee is an important but relatively understudied topic for future research.
KW - audience design
KW - computational pragmatics
KW - language adaptation
KW - lexical semantics
KW - spatial language
UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85139569425&partnerID=8YFLogxK
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M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85139569425
T3 - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition
SP - 3235
EP - 3240
BT - CogSci 2017 - Proceedings of the 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society
PB - The Cognitive Science Society
T2 - 39th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society: Computational Foundations of Cognition, CogSci 2017
Y2 - 26 July 2017 through 29 July 2017
ER -