Leibniz-Zentrum Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft Leibniz-Gemeinschaft

Online-Workshop: Statistical modelling of pragmatic meaning in contexts with large meaning spaces

Organizer(s) Benz, Anton & Aarti Joshi
Start of event 07.04.2025, 13.30 o'clock
End of event 07.04.2025, 21.00 o'clock

Description

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 will 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
  • Ari Joshi

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).