Explaining vague language
Why is language vague? Vagueness may be explained and rationalized if it can be shown that vague language is more useful to speaker and hearer than precise language. In a well-known paper, Lipman proposes a game-theoretic account of vagueness in terms of mixed strategy that leads to a puzzle: vagueness cannot be strictly better than precision at equilibrium. More recently, \'Egr\'e, Spector, Mortier and Verheyen have put forward a Bayesian account of vagueness establishing that using vague words can be strictly more informative than using precise words. This paper proposes to compare both results and to explain why they are not in contradiction. Lipman's definition of vagueness relies exclusively on a property of signaling strategies, without making any assumptions about the lexicon, whereas \'Egr\'e et al.'s involves a layer of semantic content. We argue that the semantic account of vagueness is needed, and more adequate and explanatory of vagueness.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
You May Like This Hotel Because ...: Identifying Evidence for Explainable Recommendations
Explainable recommendation is a good way to improve user satisfaction. However, explainable recommendation in dialogue is challenging since it has to handle natural language as both input and output. To tackle the challe…
Explainable RecommendationSentenceThe Vagueness of Vagueness in Noun Phrases
Natural language text has a great potential to feed knowledge bases. However, natural language is not always precise -- and sometimes intentionally so. In this position paper, we study vagueness in noun phrases. We manua…
PositionModeling Language Vagueness in Privacy Policies using Deep Neural Networks
Website privacy policies are too long to read and difficult to understand. The over-sophisticated language makes privacy notices to be less effective than they should be. People become even less willing to share their pe…
Vague Knowledge: Evidence from Analyst Reports
People in the real world often possess vague knowledge of future payoffs, for which quantification is not feasible or desirable. We argue that language, with differing ability to convey vague information, plays an import…
Vague Knowledge: Information without Transitivity and Partitions
I relax the standard assumptions of transitivity and partition structure in economic models of information to formalize vague knowledge: non-transitive indistinguishability over states. I show that vague knowledge, while…