{"pk":26408,"title":"Asking and evaluating natural language questions","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The ability to ask questions during learning is a key aspect ofhuman cognition. While recent research has suggested com-mon principles underlying human and machine “active learn-ing,” the existing literature has focused on relatively simpletypes of queries. In this paper, we study how humans constructrich and sophisticated natural language queries to search for in-formation in a large yet computationally tractable hypothesisspace. In Experiment 1, participants were allowed to ask anyquestion they liked in natural language. In Experiment 2, par-ticipants were asked to evaluate questions that they did not gen-erate themselves. While people rarely asked the most informa-tive questions in Experiment 1, they strongly preferred moreinformative questions in Experiment 2, as predicted by an idealBayesian analysis. Our results show that rigorous information-based accounts of human question asking are more widely ap-plicable than previously studied, explaining preferences acrossa diverse set of natural language questions.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Bayesian modeling; active learning; informationsearch; question asking"}],"section":"Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/4wx34357","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Anselm","middle_name":"","last_name":"Rothe","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""},{"first_name":"Brenden","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Lake","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""},{"first_name":"Todd","middle_name":"M.","last_name":"Gureckis","name_suffix":"","institution":"New York University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2016-01-01T19:00:00+01:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26408/galley/16044/download/"}]}