Generating Bilingual Pragmatic Color References

Will Monroe, Jennifer Hu, Andrew Jong, Christopher Potts


Abstract
Contextual influences on language often exhibit substantial cross-lingual regularities; for example, we are more verbose in situations that require finer distinctions. However, these regularities are sometimes obscured by semantic and syntactic differences. Using a newly-collected dataset of color reference games in Mandarin Chinese (which we release to the public), we confirm that a variety of constructions display the same sensitivity to contextual difficulty in Chinese and English. We then show that a neural speaker agent trained on bilingual data with a simple multitask learning approach displays more human-like patterns of context dependence and is more pragmatically informative than its monolingual Chinese counterpart. Moreover, this is not at the expense of language-specific semantic understanding: the resulting speaker model learns the different basic color term systems of English and Chinese (with noteworthy cross-lingual influences), and it can identify synonyms between the two languages using vector analogy operations on its output layer, despite having no exposure to parallel data.
Anthology ID:
N18-1196
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers)
Month:
June
Year:
2018
Address:
New Orleans, Louisiana
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2155–2165
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/N18-1196
DOI:
10.18653/v1/N18-1196
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Will Monroe, Jennifer Hu, Andrew Jong, and Christopher Potts. 2018. Generating Bilingual Pragmatic Color References. In Proceedings of the 2018 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies, Volume 1 (Long Papers), pages 2155–2165, New Orleans, Louisiana. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Generating Bilingual Pragmatic Color References (Monroe et al., NAACL 2018)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-script-update/N18-1196.pdf
Code
 futurulus/colors-in-context