35.477, Confs: CORE Project Workshop on Unpacking Efficient Communication: The Roles of Cognitive Bias and Extralinguistic Context in Referring Expression Choice

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-35-477. Sat Feb 10 2024. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 35.477, Confs: CORE Project Workshop on Unpacking Efficient Communication: The Roles of Cognitive Bias and Extralinguistic Context in Referring Expression Choice

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Date: 09-Feb-2024
From: Louise McNally [louise.mcnally at upf.edu]
Subject: CORE Project Workshop on Unpacking Efficient Communication: The Roles of Cognitive Bias and Extralinguistic Context in Referring Expression Choice


CORE Project Workshop on Unpacking Efficient Communication: The Roles
of Cognitive Bias and Extralinguistic Context in Referring Expression
Choice
Short Title: CORE 2024

Date: 18-Apr-2024 - 19-Apr-2024
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Contact: Marina Bolea
Contact Email: marina.bolea at upf.edu
Meeting URL: https://www.upf.edu/web/glif/2024-core-workshop

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics;
Pragmatics; Semantics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Meeting Description:

Language offers a rich set of lexical and syntactic options for
reference, reflecting the different ways we can choose to identify,
describe, categorize, and differentiate the entities and events we
talk about. For example, in any given context, a speaker can choose
between a more or less specific expression (the dog, the spotted dog,
the Dalmatian), or between expressions that convey complementary
information about the referent (the woman, the skier). A
well-established line of research highlights the role of efficiency in
referring expression choice. But what makes a referring expression
“efficient”? Efficiency in communication has frequently been
characterized in terms of an informativity/effort trade-off, with
informativity operationalized in terms of inference, and effort, in
terms of cognitive or physical cost (Horn 1984, Levshina 2021).
However, there is also evidence that other factors such as the
salience of visual features (e.g., color, Rubio-Fernández 2016) or the
prototypicality of an entity as an exemplar of a category (see, e.g.,
Degen, et al. 2020) can lead speakers to use expressions that are,
strictly speaking, overinformative in the narrowest sense of the term.
Efficiency can also be examined at the level of the whole system; for
instance, Brochhagen and Boleda (2022) argue that the
informativity/effort trade-off helps explain cross-linguistic patterns
in colexification, or how meanings are organized in the lexicon.

The goal of this workshop, supported by the Spanish AEI-funded CORE
project (“COntextual effects in the choice of Referring Expressions
for visually presented entities”, PID2020-112602GB-I00), is to dig
deeper into what makes a linguistic expression “efficient”,
considering factors such as:

- Cognitive biases that influence the potential for rapid/efficient
discrimination
- Potential for exploiting inferences due to choice of one expression
vs. another
- Information load a referring expression has to bear given
extralinguistic sources of information in the context, especially
visual information
- Lexical/constructional frequency effects and association strength
between RE options and the referent in question

Information about the 2024 CORE Project Workshop, including the
program and practical information, is now available on the workshop
web page:

https://www.upf.edu/web/glif/2024-core-workshop

For anyone interested in attending, a registration page will open soon
and will be accessible from the workshop web page.



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