36.1009, Confs: Statistical modelling of pragmatic meaning in contexts with large meaning spaces (Online)

[The LINGUIST List]

LINGUIST List: Vol-36-1009. Fri Mar 21 2025. ISSN: 1069 - 4875.

Subject: 36.1009, Confs: Statistical modelling of pragmatic meaning in contexts with large meaning spaces (Online)

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Date: 21-Mar-2025
From: Anton Benz [benz at leibniz-zas.de]
Subject: Statistical modelling of pragmatic meaning in contexts with large meaning spaces


Statistical modelling of pragmatic meaning in contexts with large
meaning spaces

Date: 07-Apr-2025 - 07-Apr-2025
Location: Online
Contact: Anton Benz
Contact Email: benz at leibniz-zas.de
Meeting URL:
https://www.leibniz-zas.de/en/about-us/events/details/events/online-workshop-statistical-modelling-of-pragmatic-meaning-in-contexts-with-large-meaning-spaces

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics;
Pragmatics; Semantics

In recent years, Bayesian approaches that model communicative
processes through the computation of probabilities by rational agents
have achieved significant success in explaining language use in simple
domains with limited sets of alternatives. Traditionally, linguistic
semantics has relied on logical analysis to represent sentence
meaning. The challenge now is to integrate these symbolic
representations with probabilistic frameworks that account for
context, uncertainty, and interlocutors’ goals. The new frontier is
thus the extension of such probabilistic models to phenomena requiring
the computation of probabilities over large sets of alternatives or
broad meaning spaces, bridging the gap between purely logical
approaches and context-sensitive, probabilistic analyses of language.
To explore the latest advancements in the (statistical) modelling of
pragmatic meaning in contexts with large meaning spaces, we host an
online workshop on Monday, the 7th of April 2024 with 30-minute talks
that are followed by a 20-minute discussion.
Invited speakers
    Fausto Carcassi https://faustocarcassi.com/
    Katrin Erk https://www.katrinerk.com/
    Daniel Lassiter https://danlassiter2.github.io/
    Jakub Szymanik https://jakubszymanik.com/
Local Organisation
    Anton Benz
    Aarti Joshi
Program
13:30 – 13:45 Introduction
13:45 – 14:45 Jakub Szymanik (U Trento)
The Shifting Sands of Meaning: How Quantifier Interpretation Varies
14:45 – 15:45 Fausto Carcassi (ILLC U Amsterdam)
Program synthesis in probabilistic pragmatics
15:45 – 16:20 Hening Wang & Michael Franke (U Tübingen)
Rational Speech Act Model with Argumentative Goals
Break
17:00 – 18:00 Katrin Erk (UT Austin)
Composing word meaning representations: probabilistic constraints  on
word meaning in context
18:00 – 19:00 Daniel Lassiter (U Edinburgh)
Why we still need small-world models in computational pragmatics
19:00 – 19:35 Anton Benz (ZAS)
>From pictures to quantifiers: Modelling complex production pathways
Registration
https://forms.office.com/e/DAAf1Lez2a
Scientific advisors (the members of the LMBayes project):
    Anton Benz
    Michael Franke
    Davit Gogolashvili
    Ari Joshi
    Uli Sauerland
    Vladimir Spokoiny
    Karsten Tabelow
    Hening Wang
The workshop topic is a key focus of the new project “LMBayes”
(Linguistic Meaning and Bayesian Modelling), which is based at ZAS
Berlin in collaboration with WIAS (Weierstrass Institute for Applied
Analysis and Stochastics) Berlin and the University of Tübingen
(https://www.leibniz-zas.de/de/forschung/forschungsbereiche/semantik-pragmatik/lmbayes).



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