Paper

Guess Who’s Coming (and Who’s Going): Bringing Perspective to the Rational Speech Acts Framework

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Abstract

We present a Rational Speech Acts approach to modeling how conversation participants reason about perspectival expressions. The interpretation of perspectival expressions, such as the motion verbs \'come\' and \'go\', depends on the point-of-view from which they are evaluated. In order to interpret a perspectival expression, the listener must jointly reason about the speaker’s intended message and their choice of perspective. We propose a Bayesian approach to this inference problem and describe an extension of the Rational Speech Acts model that incorporates perspective. We lay out three sets of predictions that this model makes relating to the lexical semantics of go, the cost of non-speaker perspectives, and marginal inference over worlds.

Keywords: perspective, pragmatics, Rational Speech Acts, Bayesian, come/go

How to Cite:

Anderson, C. J. & Dillon, B. W., (2019) “Guess Who’s Coming (and Who’s Going): Bringing Perspective to the Rational Speech Acts Framework”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 2(1), 185-194. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/9bn3-8x38