{"pk":25529,"title":"Why do you ask? Good questions provoke informative answers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"What makes a question useful? What makes an answer appropriate?\nIn this paper, we formulate a family of increasingly\nsophisticated models of question-answer behavior within the\nRational Speech Act framework. We compare these models\nbased on three different pieces of evidence: first, we demonstrate\nhow our answerer models capture a classic effect in psycholinguistics\nshowing that an answerer’s level of informativeness\nvaries with the inferred questioner goal, while keeping\nthe question constant. Second, we jointly test the questioner\nand answerer components of our model based on empirical evidence\nfrom a question-answer reasoning game. Third, we examine\na special case of this game to further distinguish among\nthe questioner models. We find that sophisticated pragmatic\nreasoning is needed to account for some of the data. People\ncan use questions to provide cues to the answerer about their\ninterest, and can select answers that are informative about inferred\ninterests.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"language understanding; pragmatics; Bayesian\nmodels; questions; answers"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4423w5kp","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Robert","middle_name":"X.D.","last_name":"Hawkins","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Andreas","middle_name":"","last_name":"Stuhlmuller","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Judith","middle_name":"","last_name":"Degen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Noah","middle_name":"D","last_name":"Goodman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2015-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/25529/galley/15153/download/"}]}