Paper

Modeling cross-linguistic production of referring expressions

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Abstract

We present a novel probabilistic model of referring expression production, synthesizing recent analyses proposed within the Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework (Frank and Goodman, 2012). Our model makes incremental utterance choice predictions (Cohn-Gordon et al. 2018a; Cohn-Gordon et al. 2018b) and assumes a non-deterministic semantics for adjectives in referring expressions (Degen et al. 2020). The model captures previously attested production patterns in reference game experiments, including English speakers’ tendency to produce redundant color adjectives more frequently than redundant size adjectives, as well as Spanish speakers’ tendency to employ redundant color adjectives less frequently than English speakers. We report the predictions made by the model under various parameter regimes, motivating future empirical work.

Keywords: computational pragmatics, reference, modification, english, spanish

How to Cite:

Waldon, B. & Degen, J., (2021) “Modeling cross-linguistic production of referring expressions”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 4(1), 206-215. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/vsfn-t057