Analyzing speaker strategy in referential communication

Abstract

We analyze a corpus of referential communication through the lens of quantitative models of speaker reasoning. Different models place different emphases on linguistic reasoning and collaborative reasoning. This leads models to make different assessments of the risks and rewards of using specific utterances in specific contexts. By fitting a latent variable model to the corpus, we can exhibit utterances that give systematic evidence of the diverse kinds of reasoning speakers employ, and build integrated models that recognize not only speaker reference but also speaker reasoning.