Understanding language requires more than the use of fixed conventions and more than
decoding combinatorial structure. Instead, comprehenders make exquisitely sensitive …

Language is a fundamentally social endeavor. Pragmatics is the study of how speakers and
listeners use social reasoning to go beyond the literal meanings of words to interpret …

A prerequisite for social coordination is bidirectional communication between teammates,
each playing two roles simultaneously: as receptive listeners and expressive speakers. For …

Navigation guided by natural language instructions presents a challenging reasoning
problem for instruction followers. Natural language instructions typically identify only a few …

We analyze human's disagreements about the validity of natural language inferences. We
show that, very often, disagreements are not dismissible as annotation “noise”, but rather …

Inquiry is fundamental to communication, and machines cannot effectively collaborate with
humans unless they can ask questions. In this work, we build a neural network model for the …

We introduce a new language learning setting relevant to building adaptive natural
language interfaces. It is inspired by Wittgenstein's language games: a human wishes to …

We present a model for pragmatically describing scenes, in which contrastive behavior
results from a combination of inference-driven pragmatics and learned semantics. Like …

We derive a probabilistic account of the vagueness and context-sensitivity of scalar
adjectives from a Bayesian approach to communication and interpretation. We describe an …

We present a model of pragmatic referring expression interpretation in a grounded
communication task (identifying colors from descriptions) that draws upon predictions from …