When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to 'overinformative' referring expressions

Understand

Referring is one of the most basic and prevalent uses of language.

• How do speakers choose from the wealth of referring expressions at their disposal? Rational theories of language use have come under attack for decades for not being able to account for the seemingly irrational overinformativeness ubiquitous in referring expressions.
• Here we present a novel production model of referring expressions within the Rational Speech Act framework that treats speakers as agents that rationally trade off cost and informativeness of utterances.
• Crucially, we relax the assumption that informativeness is computed with respect to a deterministic Boolean semantics, in favor of a non-deterministic continuous semantics.