{"pk":26174,"title":"Searching large hypothesis spaces by asking questions","subtitle":null,"abstract":"One way people deal with uncertainty is by asking questions.A showcase of this ability is the classic 20 questions gamewhere a player asks questions in search of a secret object. Pre-vious studies using variants of this task have found that peopleare effective question-askers according to normative Bayesianmetrics such as expected information gain. However, so far,the studies amenable to mathematical modeling have used onlysmall sets of possible hypotheses that were provided explic-itly to participants, far from the unbounded hypothesis spacespeople often grapple with. Here, we study how people eval-uate the quality of questions in an unrestricted 20 Questionstask. We present a Bayesian model that utilizes a large data setof object-question pairs and expected information gain to se-lect questions. This model provides good predictions regardingpeople’s preferences and outperforms simpler alternatives.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Bayesian modeling; active learning"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0dz4648h","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Alexander","middle_name":"N.","last_name":"Cohen","name_suffix":"","institution":"Hunter College High School","department":""},{"first_name":"Brenden","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Lake","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26174/galley/15810/download/"}]}