{"pk":28588,"title":"Asking goal-oriented questions and learning from answers","subtitle":null,"abstract":"The study of question asking in humans and machines hasgained attention in recent years. A key aspect of question ask-ing is the ability to select good (informative) questions froma provided set. Machines—in particular neural networks—generally struggle with two important aspects of question ask-ing, namely to learn from the answer to their selected ques-tion and to flexibly adjust their questioning to new goals. Inthe present paper, we show that people are sensitive to both ofthese aspects and describe a unified Bayesian account of ques-tion asking that is capable of similar ingenuity. In the first ex-periment, we predict people’s judgments when adjusting theirquestion-asking towards a particular goal. In the second ex-periment, we predict people’s judgments when deciding whatfollow-up question to ask. An alternative model based on su-perficial features, such as the existence of certain key wordsin the questions, was not able to capture these judgments to areasonable degree.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Bayesian modeling; active learning; informationsearch; question asking"}],"section":"Papers with Oral Presentations","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/04q6z1mq","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":"2019-01-01T18:00:00Z","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/28588/galley/18459/download/"}]}