In this paper, we provide an in-depth review of how the Gricean maxims have been used to develop and evaluate Natural Language Processing (NLP) systems. Originating from the domain of pragmatics, the Gricean maxims are foundational principles aimed at optimising communicative effectiveness, encompassing the maxims of Quantity, Quality, Relation, and Manner. We explore how these principles are operationalised within NLP through the development of data sets, benchmarks, qualitative evaluation and the formulation of tasks such as Data-to-text, Referring Expressions, Conversational Agents, and Reasoning with a specific focus on Natural Language Generation (NLG). We further present current works on the integration of these maxims in the design and assessment of Large Language Models (LLMs), highlighting their potential influence on enhancing model performance and interaction capabilities. Additionally, this paper identifies and discusses relevant challenges and opportunities, with a special emphasis on the cultural adaptation and contextual applicability of the Gricean maxims. While they have been widely used in different NLP applications, we present the first comprehensive survey of the Gricean maxims’ impact.

We introduce CLAUSE-ATLAS, a resource of XIX and XX century English novels annotated automatically. This corpus, which contains 41,715 labeled clauses, allows to study stories as sequences of eventive, subjective and contextual information. We use it to investigate if recent large language models, in particular gpt-3.5-turbo with 16k tokens of context, constitute promising tools to annotate large amounts of data for literary studies (we show that this is the case). Moreover, by analyzing the annotations so collected, we find that our clause-based approach to literature captures structural patterns within books, as well as qualitative differences between them.

Linguistic conventions that arise in dialogue reflect common ground and can increase communicative efficiency. Social robots that can understand these conventions and the process by which they arise have the potential to become efficient communication partners. Nevertheless, it is unclear how robots can engage in convention formation when presented with both familiar and new information. We introduce an adaptable game platform, SPOTTER, to study the dynamics of convention formation for visually grounded referring expressions in both human-human and human-robot interaction. Specifically, we seek to elicit convention forming for members of an inner circle of well-known individuals in the common ground, as opposed to individuals from an outer circle, who are unfamiliar. We release an initial corpus of 5000 utterances from two exploratory pilot experiments in Dutch. Different from previous work focussing on human-human interaction, we find that referring expressions for both familiar and unfamiliar individuals maintain their length throughout human-robot interaction. Stable conventions are formed, although these conventions can be impacted by distracting outer circle individuals. With our distinction between familiar and unfamiliar, we create a contrastive operationalization of common ground, which aids research into convention formation.

In this paper, we present the outcome of a structural linguistic analysis performed on a referentially grounded FrameNet dataset. In this dataset, multiple Dutch events are referenced by multiple co-referential Dutch news texts. Mentions in those documents are annotated with respect to their referential grounding (i.e., links to structured Wikidata), and their conceptual representation (i.e., frames). Provided with each document’s temporal reporting distance, we selected documents for two events - the Utrecht shooting and MH17 - and performed an analysis in which we tracked the events’ participants over time in both their focalization (number of mentions) and their framing (distribution of frame element labels). This way, we use the carefully collected and annotated data to schematize shifts in focalization and perspectivization of the participants as a result of the constantly developing narrative surrounding the events. This novel type of linguistic research involves reference to the real-world referents and takes into account storytelling in news streams.

Toxic language remains an ongoing challenge on social media platforms, presenting significant issues for users and communities. This paper provides a cross-topic and cross-lingual analysis of toxicity in Reddit conversations. We collect 1.5 million comment threads from 481 communities in six languages. By aligning languages with topics, we thoroughly analyze how toxicity spikes within different communities. Our analysis targets six languages spanning different communities and topics such as Culture, Politics, and News. We observe consistent patterns across languages where toxicity increases within the same topics while also identifying significant differences where specific language communities exhibit notable variations in relation to certain topics.

Detecting inappropriate language in online platforms is vital for maintaining a safe and respectful digital environment, especially in the context of hate speech prevention. However, defining what constitutes inappropriate language can be highly subjective and context-dependent, varying from person to person. This study presents the outcomes of a comprehensive examination of the subjectivity involved in assessing inappropriateness within conversational contexts. Different annotation methods, including expert annotation, crowd annotation, ChatGPT-generated annotation, and lexicon-based annotation, were applied to English Reddit conversations. The analysis revealed a high level of agreement across these annotation methods, with most disagreements arising from subjective interpretations of inappropriate language. This emphasizes the importance of implementing content moderation systems that not only recognize inappropriate content but also understand and adapt to diverse user perspectives and contexts. The study contributes to the evolving field of hate speech annotation by providing a detailed analysis of annotation differences in relation to the subjective task of judging inappropriate words in conversations.