The world’s languages differ in how they order adjectives and nouns relative to each other. We ask whether cross-linguistic variation and systematicity in adjective-noun order can be explained by the iterated pressure for pragmatic referential communication. To this end, we formalize cooperative pressures on referential communication in the Rational Speech Act framework in an iterated learning setting. First, we show that the less informative adjectives are relative to nouns, the more likely they are to occur post-nominally. This is the case when informativeness is manipulated via the composition of the lexical space (i.e., changing the relative number of adjectives vs. nouns that are available for reference), and via the inherent referential utility of adjectives vs. nouns. Secondly, we show that under the assumption that nouns are on average more informative than adjectives, the model predicts a cross-linguistic distribution of ordering preferences that qualitatively resembles the empirical one, with these biases becoming further entrenched with iterated language use. Taken together, these results suggest a possible pathway for syntactic preferences to be calcified over time as the result of pragmatic communicative pressures on language.


The cross-linguistic order of adjectives and nouns may be the result of iterated pragmatic pressures on referential communication

Individuals teach others about the world through language and demonstration. When might one of these modalities be more effective than the other? In this work, we study the factors that modulate the effectiveness of language vs. demonstration through the lens of multi-agent systems. We train neural network agents to teach via language or demonstration in a grounded communication task, manipulating 1) the inherent difficulty of the task and 2) the competence of the teacher. We find that teaching by demonstration is more effective in the simplest settings, but language is more effective as task difficulty increases, due to its ability to generalize more effectively to unseen scenarios. Overall, these results provide converging evidence for a tradeoff between language and demonstration as teaching modalities, and make the novel predictions that demonstration may be optimal for easy tasks, while language enables generalization in more challenging settings.

Characterizing tradeoffs between teaching via language and demonstrations in multi-agent systems

T.34: Language Modeling

technical paper

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society will take place in Sydney, Australia as a modified hybrid conference. Presentations from the main-session room will be live-streamed every day for all events. This will include all invited talks and award sessions. Recordings of all CogSci 2023 sessions will be made available for on-demand viewing after the conference.<br>
The in-person component will be held at the International Convention Centre Sydney at Darling Harbour. The Conference will take place Wednesday July 26th – Saturday July 29th, 2023 (Wednesday, July 26th is the Workshops Day).

Join us!

<br>[**The Program at a Glance can be found here**](https://cognitivesciencesociety.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/07/COgSci-PAAG-V2.pdf)
<br>[**The Detailed Program can be found here**](https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/mswz/)
<br><br>

#### **CogSci 2023 Program Book**
<iframe style="width:700px;height:400px" src="https://online.fliphtml5.com/ebtyf/tzgk/"  seamless="seamless" scrolling="no" frameborder="0" allowtransparency="true" allowfullscreen="true" ></iframe>
<br>

CogSci 2023

The 45th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society presents the latest research across cognitive science and highlights the theme of Cognition in Context.

This session has no scheduled virtual poster presentation time, but attendees will be able to comment and ask questions about your work/research asynchronously throughout the conference.<br>

**If you are a virtual poster presenter**, you can leave a message in your poster area chat space to advise times (and time zone) that you will be available either in the chat box, or by setting up your own online meeting room (Zoom, etc.).<br>
**If you are an attendee**, please check each poster's chat box and arrange time with presenter.<br>



Dhara Yu

2

SHORT BIO

Presentations

The cross-linguistic order of adjectives and nouns may be the result of iterated pragmatic pressures on referential communication

Characterizing tradeoffs between teaching via language and demonstrations in multi-agent systems

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES