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.