Learning from Omission
Bill McDowell, Noah D. Goodman · 2019
Pragmatic reasoning allows humans to go beyond the literal meaning when interpreting language in context.Previous work has shown that such reasoning can improve the performance of already-trained language understanding systems.Here, we explore whether pragmatic reasoning during training can improve the quality of learned meanings.Our experiments on reference game data show that end-to-end pragmatic training produces more accurate utterance interpretation models, especially when data is sparse and language is complex.