Full Title: CORE Project Workshop on Unpacking Efficient Communication: The Roles of Cognitive Bias and Extralinguistic Context in Referring Expression Choice
Short Title: CORE 2024

Date: 18-Apr-2024 - 19-Apr-2024
Location: Barcelona, Spain
Contact Person: Marina Bolea
Meeting Email: [email protected]
Web Site: https://www.upf.edu/web/glif/2024-core-workshop

Linguistic Field(s): Cognitive Science; Computational Linguistics; Pragmatics; Semantics
Subject Language(s): English (eng)

Call Deadline: 20-Dec-2023

Meeting Description:

Language offers a rich set of lexical and syntactic options for reference, reflecting the different ways we can choose to identify, describe, categorize, and differentiate the entities and events we talk about. For example, in any given context, a speaker can choose between a more or less specific expression (the dog, the spotted dog, the Dalmatian), or between expressions that convey complementary information about the referent (the woman, the skier). A well-established line of research highlights the role of efficiency in referring expression choice. But what makes a referring expression “efficient”? Efficiency in communication has frequently been characterized in terms of an informativity/effort trade-off, with informativity operationalized in terms of inference, and effort, in terms of cognitive or physical cost (Horn 1984, Levshina 2021). However, there is also evidence that other factors such as the salience of visual features (e.g., color, Rubio-Fernández 2016) or the prototypicality of an entity as an exemplar of a category (see, e.g., Degen, et al. 2020) can lead speakers to use expressions that are, strictly speaking, overinformative in the narrowest sense of the term. Efficiency can also be examined at the level of the whole system; for instance, Brochhagen and Boleda (2022) argue that the informativity/effort trade-off helps explain cross-linguistic patterns in colexification, or how meanings are organized in the lexicon.

The goal of this workshop, supported by the Spanish AEI-funded CORE project (“COntextual effects in the choice of Referring Expressions for visually presented entities”, PID2020-112602GB-I00), is to dig deeper into what makes a linguistic expression “efficient”, considering factors such as:

- Cognitive biases that influence the potential for rapid/efficient discrimination
- Potential for exploiting inferences due to choice of one expression vs. another
- Information load a referring expression has to bear given extralinguistic sources of information in the context, especially visual information
- Lexical/constructional frequency effects and association strength between RE options and the referent in question

2nd Call for Papers:

The goal of this workshop, supported by the Spanish AEI-funded CORE project (“COntextual effects in the choice of Referring Expressions for visually presented entities”, PID2020-112602GB-I00), is to dig deeper into what makes a linguistic expression “efficient”, considering factors such as:

- Cognitive biases that influence the potential for rapid/efficient discrimination
- Potential for exploiting inferences due to choice of one expression vs. another
- Information load a referring expression has to bear given extralinguistic sources of information in the context, especially visual information
- Lexical/constructional frequency effects and association strength between RE options and the referent in question

We aim to give a forum to new and especially exploratory research in this area. The workshop will include a combination of invited talks, presentations of ongoing research by project members, and presentations and/or posters selected in this open call.

We invite submissions on topics including, but not limited to:

- The general principles that intervene in efficient communication, especially alternatives to or refined definitions of notions such as “efficiency”, “effort”, and “informativity”
- Which features of entities or events are more likely to be used for discrimination
- The role of the visual context and/or distractor entities in influencing RE choice; more generally, the role of multi-modal aspects
- The role of the implicit semantic organization of RE alternatives and the conventionalized division of labor between them, especially organization based on implicative semantic relations (e.g. hyponymy, troponymy)
- The factors influencing the choice among alternative cross-classifications of a target referent (e.g. the choice between “taxonomic” descriptions such as woman vs. role-based descriptions such as skier)
- The dynamics between reference and the linguistic system, that is, how efficient communication is enabled by and at the same time transforms a given language

We take a methodologically pluralistic approach and thus welcome presentations on experimental studies, analysis of corpus data, computational modeling, critiques or analyses of published research, as well as position papers.

Invited speakers:
Lilia Rissman, Rochester Institute of Technology
Paula Rubio-Fernández, Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics
Sina Zarrieß, University of Bielefeld

Abstract guidelines: Abstracts should not exceed 2 pages in length (A4 or letter-size), in 12 pt. font, with 1-inch/2,5-cm margins; a third page can be used for references, data, and figures. Please indicate whether you want the submission to be considered for an oral presentation, a poster (+flash presentation), or either. Abstracts will be submitted via EasyChair at https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=core2024.

Important dates:
Deadline for abstract submission: December 15, 2023
Notification of acceptance: January 15, 2024
Workshop dates: April 18-19, 2024