{"pk":26870,"title":"Convention-formation in iterated reference games","subtitle":null,"abstract":"What cognitive mechanisms support the emergence of linguis-tic conventions from repeated interaction? We present re-sults from a large-scale, multi-player replication of the clas-sic tangrams task, focusing on three foundational propertiesof conventions: arbitrariness, stability, and reduction of ut-terance length over time. These results motivate a theory ofconvention-formation where agents, though initially uncertainabout word meanings in context, assume others are using lan-guage with such knowledge. Thus, agents may learn aboutmeanings by reasoning about a knowledgeable, informativepartner; if all agents engage in such a process, they success-fully coordinate their beliefs, giving rise to a conventionalcommunication system. We formalize this theory in a compu-tational model of language understanding as social inferenceand demonstrate that it produces all three properties in a sim-plified domain.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"conventions; pragmatics; communication"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/46r654df","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Robert","middle_name":"X.D","last_name":"Hawkins","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"C.","last_name":"Frank","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Noah","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Goodman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26870/galley/16506/download/"}]}