Formal Fridays: Greg Scontras (UCI)

Gregory Scontras (Language Science, UC Irvine) gives a talk as part of the Formal Fridays series.

Title: The social reasoning behind ambiguity resolution

Abstract: Ambiguity is everywhere, yet it rarely leads to catastrophes in communication. In this talk, I present a computational cognitive model of the social reasoning that we perform when resolving ambiguities. I motivate the model on the basis of a case study in which young children perform quite differently from adults when it comes to understanding utterances with multiple potential meanings. There we see that pragmatic factors may play a larger role than grammatical processing factors in explaining children’s non-adult-like behavior, and the computational model offers a hypothesis as to why that’s so: pragmatic factors have a larger impact on the truth-value judgment task that researchers use to investigate young children’s language understanding. I then provide additional support for the proposed model of ambiguity resolution, first from adult behavioral experiments, then from the largest-of-its-kind annotated corpus of naturally-occurring ambiguities. Finally, I show how the proposed view of ambiguity resolution as recursive social reasoning offers additional insight into the benefits of having ambiguity in language: by observing how others resolve ambiguity, we learn about the private thoughts they use to do so.