Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication

Yuwei Bao, Sayan Ghosh, Joyce Chai


Abstract
Human communication is a collaborative process. Speakers, on top of conveying their own intent, adjust the content and language expressions by taking the listeners into account, including their knowledge background, personalities, and physical capabilities. Towards building AI agents with similar abilities in language communication, we propose a novel rational reasoning framework, Pragmatic Rational Speaker (PRS), where the speaker attempts to learn the speaker-listener disparity and adjust the speech accordingly, by adding a light-weighted disparity adjustment layer into working memory on top of speaker’s long-term memory system. By fixing the long-term memory, the PRS only needs to update its working memory to learn and adapt to different types of listeners. To validate our framework, we create a dataset that simulates different types of speaker-listener disparities in the context of referential games. Our empirical results demonstrate that the PRS is able to shift its output towards the language that listeners are able to understand, significantly improve the collaborative task outcome, and learn the disparity more efficiently than joint training.
Anthology ID:
2022.acl-long.202
Volume:
Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Smaranda Muresan, Preslav Nakov, Aline Villavicencio
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2829–2842
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.acl-long.202
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.acl-long.202
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Yuwei Bao, Sayan Ghosh, and Joyce Chai. 2022. Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication. In Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 2829–2842, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Learning to Mediate Disparities Towards Pragmatic Communication (Bao et al., ACL 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/naacl24-info/2022.acl-long.202.pdf
Code
 sled-group/pragmatic-rational-speaker