Nonliteral understanding of number words
Name
Kao-2014-Nonliteral understan.pdf
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1.28 MB
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Adobe PDF
Checksum (MD5)
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Author(s)
Bergen, Leon
Kao, Justine T.
Wu, Jean Y.
Goodman, Noah D.
Date Issued
August 2014
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Publisher
National Academy of Sciences (U.S.)
Citation
Kao, J. T., J. Y. Wu, L. Bergen, and N. D. Goodman. “Nonliteral Understanding of Number Words.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 111, no. 33 (August 4, 2014): 12002–12007. © 2014 National Academy of Sciences
Version
Final published version
Abstract
One of the most puzzling and important facts about communication is that people do not always mean what they say; speakers often use imprecise, exaggerated, or otherwise literally false descriptions to communicate experiences and attitudes. Here, we focus on the nonliteral interpretation of number words, in particular hyperbole (interpreting unlikely numbers as exaggerated and conveying affect) and pragmatic halo (interpreting round numbers imprecisely). We provide a computational model of number interpretation as social inference regarding the communicative goal, meaning, and affective subtext of an utterance. We show that our model predicts humans’ interpretation of number words with high accuracy. Our model is the first to our knowledge to incorporate principles of communication and empirically measured background knowledge to quantitatively predict hyperbolic and pragmatic halo effects in number interpretation. This modeling framework provides a unified approach to nonliteral language understanding more generally.
MIT Department
Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Terms of Use
Article is made available in accordance with the publisher's policy and may be subject to US copyright law. Please refer to the publisher's site for terms of use.
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DOI of Published Version
https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1407479111
