Probabilistic modeling of rational communication with conditionals. (arXiv:2105.05502v4 [cs.CL] UPDATED)

While a large body of work has scrutinized the meaning of conditional
sentences, considerably less attention has been paid to formal models of their
pragmatic use and interpretation. Here, we take a probabilistic approach to
pragmatic reasoning about indicative conditionals which flexibly integrates
gradient beliefs about richly structured world states. We model listeners'
update of their prior beliefs about the causal structure of the world and the
joint probabilities of the consequent and antecedent based on assumptions about
the speaker's …

arxiv communication modeling probabilistic modeling