Friday, September 19, 2014

Probabilistic pragmatics bibliography

Pragmatics is the study of human communication in context. A tremendous amount of experimental and theoretical work has been done on pragmatics since Grice's seminal statement of the cooperative principle. In recent years, a number of people have been working on a new set of formal models of pragmatics, using probabilistic methods and approaches from game theory to quantify human pragmatic reasoning. 

This post is an incomplete bibliography of some of the recent work following this approach. My goal in compiling this bibliography is primarily personal: I want to keep track of this growing literature and the different branches it's taken. I've primarily included research that is either formal/computational in nature, or based directly on formal models. Please let me know in the comments or by email if you have work that you would like added here.
Probabilistic Models and Experimental Tests
One flaw in this literature is that right now there's no one good paper to look at for an intro. The first paper on this list is (IMO) a good introduction, but it's only a page long, so if you want details you have to look elsewhere. 
Game Theoretic Approaches
This section is a very incomplete list of some of the great work on this topic in the game theory tradition. Note, Michael Franke is someone different from me
Extensions to Other Phenomena
Many of these models have been applied primarily to reference resolution but many other linguistic phenomena seem amenable to the probabilistic pragmatics approach.
Connections to Language Acquisition
Connections with Pedagogy and Teaching
There are many interesting and as-yet-unexplored connections between pragmatics and teaching. 

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