{"pk":26999,"title":"Warm (for winter): Comparison class understanding in vague language","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Speakers often refer to context only implicitly when using lan-guage. The utterance “it’s warm outside” could signal it’swarm relative to other days of the year or just relative to thecurrent season (e.g., it’s warm for winter). Warm vaguely con-veys that the temperature is high relative to some contextualcomparison class, but little is known about how a listener de-cides upon such a standard of comparison. Here, we formalizehow world knowledge and listeners’ internal models of speechproduction can drive the resolution of a comparison class incontext. We introduce a Rational Speech Act model and de-rive two novel predictions from it, which we validate using aparaphrase experiment to measure listeners’ beliefs about thelikely comparison class used by a speaker. Our model makesquantitative predictions given prior world knowledge for thedomains in question. We triangulate this knowledge with afollow-up language task in the same domains, using Bayesiandata analysis to infer priors from both data sets","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"comparison class; pragmatics; Rational SpeechAct; Bayesian cognitive model; Bayesian data analysis"}],"section":"Talks: Papers","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0hq7w5bn","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"Henry","last_name":"Tessler","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"","last_name":"Lopez-Brau","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Central Florida","department":""},{"first_name":"Noah","middle_name":"D.","last_name":"Goodman","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford University","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2017-01-02T02:00:00+08:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/26999/galley/16635/download/"}]}