Noah Goodman

Tuesday 25th July 2017

Time: 4pm

Ground Floor Seminar Room

25 Howland Street, London, W1T 4JG

Using language by reasoning about others

Probabilistic models of human cognition have been widely successful at capturing the ways that people represent and reason with uncertain knowledge. The Rational Speech Act framework uses probabilistic modeling tools to formalize natural language understanding as social reasoning: literal sentence meaning arises through probabilistic conditioning, and pragmatic enrichment is the result of listeners reasoning about cooperative speakers. I will describe how this framework can resolve several puzzles in human language use: overinformativity in reference, viewpoint neglect in coordination, and the sorites paradox.

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