Implicatures and Nested Beliefs in Approximate Decentralized-POMDPs

Adam Vogel, Christopher Potts and Dan Jurafsky

The 51st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics - Short Papers (ACL Short Papers 2013)
Sofia, Bulgaria, August 4-9, 2013

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Abstract

Conversational implicatures involve reasoning about multiply nested belief structures. This complexity poses significant challenges for computational models of conversation and cognition. We show that agents in the multi-agent Decentralized-POMDP reach implicature-rich interpretations simply as a by-product of the way they reason about each other to maximize joint utility. Our simulations involve a reference game of the sort studied in psychology and linguistics as well as a dynamic, interactional scenario involving implemented artificial agents.

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