{"pk":28005,"title":"Tiptoeing around it: Inference from absence in potentially offensive speech","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Language that describes people in a concise manner may con-flict with social norms (e.g., referring to people by their race),presenting a conflict between transferring information effi-ciently and avoiding offensive language. When a speakeris describing others, we propose that listeners consider thespeaker’s use or absence of potentially offensive language toreason about the speaker’s goals. We formalize this hypothe-sis in a probabilistic model of polite pragmatic language un-derstanding, and use it to generate predictions about interpre-tations of utterances in ambiguous contexts, which we testempirically. We find that participants are sensitive to poten-tially offensive language when resolving ambiguity in refer-ence. These results support the idea that listeners representconflicts in speakers’ goals and use that uncertainty to inter-pret otherwise underspecified utterances.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"politeness; social meaning; pragmatics; Bayesiancognitive model; Rational Speech Act model"}],"section":"Publication-based-Talks","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6n2261g3","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Monica","middle_name":"A","last_name":"Gates","name_suffix":"","institution":"UC Berkley","department":""},{"first_name":"Tess","middle_name":"L","last_name":"Veuthey","name_suffix":"","institution":"UCSF","department":""},{"first_name":"Michael","middle_name":"Henry","last_name":"Tessler","name_suffix":"","institution":"Stanford","department":""},{"first_name":"Kevin","middle_name":"A","last_name":"Smith","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Tobias","middle_name":"","last_name":"Gerstenberg","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""},{"first_name":"Laurie","middle_name":"","last_name":"Bayet","name_suffix":"","institution":"Harvard","department":""},{"first_name":"Joshua","middle_name":"B","last_name":"Tenenbaum","name_suffix":"","institution":"MIT","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2018-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28005/galley/17644/download/"}]}