@inproceedings{estienne-etal-2025-collaborative,
    title = "Collaborative Rational Speech Act: Pragmatic Reasoning for Multi-Turn Dialog",
    author = "Estienne, Lautaro  and
      Zenou, Gabriel Ben  and
      Naderi, Nona  and
      Cheung, Jackie CK  and
      Piantanida, Pablo",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1145/",
    pages = "22520--22534",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "As AI systems take on collaborative roles, they must reason about shared goals and beliefs{---}not just generate fluent language. The Rational Speech Act (RSA) framework offers a principled approach to pragmatic reasoning, but existing extensions face challenges in scaling to multi-turn, collaborative scenarios. In this paper, we introduce Collaborative Rational Speech Act (CRSA), an information-theoretic (IT) extension of RSA that models multi-turn dialog by optimizing a gain function adapted from rate-distortion theory. This gain is an extension of the gain model that is maximized in the original RSA model but takes into account the scenario in which both agents in a conversation have private information and produce utterances conditioned on the dialog. We demonstrate the effectiveness of CRSA on referential games and template-based doctor{--}patient dialogs in the medical domain. Empirical results show that CRSA yields more consistent, interpretable, and collaborative behavior than existing baselines{---}paving the way for more pragmatic and socially aware language agents."
}