TY - GEN
T1 - The utility of vagueness: does it lie elsewhere?
T2 - Seminar at Institute for Language, Cognition and Computation, University of Edinburgh
AU - van Deemter, Kees
AU - Green, Matthew James
PY - 2014/3
Y1 - 2014/3
N2 - Much of everyday language is vague, yet standard game-theoretic models make it difficult to see how (borderline) vagueness can have benefits over crisp ones in co-operative situations. This talk will start by discussing the relevance of these issues for Natural Language Generation, and reporting on a range of attempts to pin down what the benefits of vagueness might be. Next, we report on a sequence of psycholinguistic experiments that were recently conducted in Aberdeen, which are starting to suggest a new, and less favourable view of vagueness: it appears that many of the benefits that vague terms can exert are caused by factors that tend to co-occur with vagueness, rather than by vagueness itself.
AB - Much of everyday language is vague, yet standard game-theoretic models make it difficult to see how (borderline) vagueness can have benefits over crisp ones in co-operative situations. This talk will start by discussing the relevance of these issues for Natural Language Generation, and reporting on a range of attempts to pin down what the benefits of vagueness might be. Next, we report on a sequence of psycholinguistic experiments that were recently conducted in Aberdeen, which are starting to suggest a new, and less favourable view of vagueness: it appears that many of the benefits that vague terms can exert are caused by factors that tend to co-occur with vagueness, rather than by vagueness itself.
M3 - Other contribution
ER -