A model of rational interlocutors: Unification of comprehension and production
Who we communicate with influences both our interpretation of their utterances and the design of our own. Such adjustment to the conversational partner is studied as speaker modeling in comprehension and as audience design in production, with the two literatures having developed largely separately. We argue that both adjustments express one rational computation and propose the rational interlocutor (RI) model, a computational account unifying comprehension and production. An interlocutor maintains a model of their partner, defined by three parameters: an identity parameter Π sets the messages and forms expected from the partner; a fidelity parameter Φ sets how reliably messages and uttera...
| Authors | Hanlin Wu, Zhenguang G. Cai |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 26 September 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 26 September 2026 |
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