Matthew Stone
Abstract:The science of language has long appealed to people’s strategic and social reasoning as a crucial ingredient in explaining language use. That normally involves an appeal to ideally rational models of collaboration, despite a number of clear challenges, including empirical evidence of conventional patterns of interaction in conversation, the heuristic and biased nature of human practical reasoning, and the problematic status of communication in adversarial situations. Recent shared tasks in language use, particularly GIVE (generating instructions in virtual environments), raise the possibility of learning more about these problems and their solutions through research competitions. The trick is to develop games which elicit simple and natural linguistic behavior.
Slides:matthew_stone.pdf