Learning to refer informatively by amortizing pragmatic reasoning

Understand

A hallmark of human language is the ability to effectively and efficiently convey contextually relevant information.

• One theory for how humans reason about language is presented in the Rational Speech Acts (RSA) framework, which captures pragmatic phenomena via a process of recursive social reasoning (Goodman & Frank, 2016).
• However, RSA represents ideal reasoning in an unconstrained setting.
• We explore the idea that speakers might learn to amortize the cost of RSA computation over time by directly optimizing for successful communication with an internal listener model.