Call for Papers
2024 CORE Project Workshop Unpacking Efficient Communication: The Roles of
Cognitive Bias and Extralinguistic Context in Referring Expression Choice
When: April 18-19, 2024
Where: Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona
Language offers a rich set of lexical and syntactic options for reference,
reflecting the different ways we can choose to identify,
describe, categorize, and differentiate the entities and events we talk
about. For example, in any given context, a speaker can choose between a
more or less specific expression (the dog, the spotted dog, the Dalmatian),
or between expressions that convey complementary information about the
referent (the woman, the skier). A well-established line of research
highlights the role of efficiency in referring expression choice. But what
makes a referring expression “efficient”? Efficiency in communication has
been frequently characterized in terms of an informativity/effort
trade-off, with informativity operationalized in terms of inference, and
effort, in terms of cognitive or physical cost (Horn 1984, Levshina 2021).
However, there is also evidence that other factors such as the salience of
visual features (e.g., color, Rubio-Fernández 2016) or the prototypicality
of an entity as an exemplar of a category (see, e.g., Degen, et al. 2020)
can lead speakers to use expressions that are, strictly speaking,
overinformative in the narrowest sense of the term. Efficiency can also be
examined at the level of the whole system; for instance, Brochhagen and
Boleda (2022) argue that the informativity/effort trade-off helps explain
cross-linguistic patterns in colexification, or how meanings are organized
in the lexicon.
The goal of this workshop, supported by the Spanish AEI-funded CORE project
(“COntextual effects in the choice of Referring Expressions for visually
presented entities”, PID2020-112602GB-I00), is to dig deeper into what
makes a linguistic expression “efficient”, considering factors such as:
Cognitive biases that influence the potential for rapid/efficient
discrimination.
Potential for exploiting inferences due to choice of one expression vs.
another.
Information load a referring expression has to bear given extralinguistic
sources of information in the context, especially visual information.
Lexical/constructional frequency effects and association strength between
RE options and the referent in question.
The workshop aims to give a forum to new and especially exploratory
research in this area. The workshop will include a combination of invited
talks, presentations of ongoing research by project members, and
presentations and/or posters selected in this open call.
We invite submissions on topics including, but not limited to:
The general principles that intervene in efficient communication,
especially alternatives to or refined definitions of notions such as
“efficiency”, “effort”, and “informativity”.
Which features of entities or events are more likely to be used for
discrimination.
The role of the visual context and/or distractor entities in influencing
RE choice; more generally, the role of multi-modal aspects.
The role of the implicit semantic organization of RE alternatives and the
conventionalized division of labor between them, especially organization
based on implicative semantic relations (e.g. hyponymy, troponymy).
The factors influencing the choice among alternative
cross-classifications of a target referent (e.g. the choice between
“taxonomic” descriptions such as woman vs. role-based descriptions such as
skier).
The dynamics between reference and the linguistic system, that is, how
efficient communication is enabled by and at the same time transforms a
given language.
We take a methodologically pluralistic approach and thus welcome
presentations on experimental studies, analysis of corpus data,
computational modeling, critiques or analyses of published research, as
well as position papers.
Invited speakers:
Lilia Rissman, University of Wisconsin - Madison
Paula Rubio-Fernández, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Sina Zarrieß, University of Bielefeld
Abstract guidelines: Abstracts should not exceed 2 pages in length (A4 or
letter-size), in 12 pt. font, with 1-inch/2,5-cm margins; a third page can
be used for references, data, and figures. Please indicate whether you want
the submission to be considered for a paper, a poster, or either. Abstracts
should be submitted to EasyChair at the following link:
https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=core2024.
Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: December 20, 2023
Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2024
Workshop dates: April 18-19, 2024
Organizers: Louise McNally, Gemma Boleda, Jialing Liang, Marina Bolea.
References:
Degen, J., Hawkins, R. D., Graf, C., Kreiss, E., & Goodman, N. D. (2020).
When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to “overinformative”
referring expressions. Psychological Review, 127(4), 591–621.
Gualdoni, E., T. Brochhagen, A. Mädebach, G. Boleda. 2023. What's in a
name? A large-scale computational study on how competition between names
affects naming variation. Journal of Memory and Language, 133, 104459.
Brochhagen, T., G. Boleda. 2022. When do languages use the same word for
different meanings? The Goldilocks Principle in colexification. Cognition,
226, 105179.
Horn, L.R. (1984). Towards a new taxonomy for pragmatic inference: Q-based
and R-based implicature. In Schiffrin, D. (ed.), Meaning, Form, and Use in
Context: Linguistic Applications, 11-42. Georgetown University Press,
Washington, DC. Levshina, N. (2023). Communicative
efficiency: Language structure and use. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press.
Rissman, L., & Lupyan, G. (2022). A Dissociation Between Conceptual
Prominence and Explicit Category Learning: Evidence From Agent and Patient
Event Roles. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 151(7):1707-1732.
Rubio-Fernandez, P., Mollica, F., & Jara-Ettinger, J. (2021). Speakers and
listeners exploit word order for communicative efficiency: A
cross-linguistic investigation. Journal of Experimental Psychology:
General, 150(3), 583–594.
Schüz, S., Han, T., Zarrieß, S. (2021) Diversity as a By-Product:
Goal-oriented Language Generation Leads to Linguistic Variation.
Proceedings of the 22nd Annual SIGdial Meeting on Discourse and Dialogue.
Association for Computational Linguistics.