When/where: E2-215 at 12pm

Presenter: Reuben Harry Cohn-Gordon (Stanford University)
Title: Bayesian Models of Pragmatics for Natural Language

Abstract: Emerging from work in Bayesian cognitive science and game theory, probabilistic models of pragmatic reasoning have been successful at modelling human inferences about linguistic meaning, on the basis of their interlocutor’s intentions and knowledge. However, they have largely been applied to idealized domains. Meanwhile, natural language processing systems have made significant progress at open-domain tasks requiring language understanding, but often struggle to behave in human-like ways. I describe work combining these approaches, with the aim of obtaining interpretable models of pragmatic reasoning for natural language.