Task: Question Generation
Input (English): Experiment 1 directly tested the hypothesis that speakers increase their specificity in contexts with asymmetry in visual access. We found that speakers are not only context-sensitive in choosing referring expressions that distinguish target from distractors in a shared context, but are occlusion-sensitive, adaptively compensating for uncertainty. These results strongly suggest that the speaker's informativity influences listener accuracy. In support of this hypothesis, we found a strong negative correlation between informativity and error rates across items and conditions: listeners make fewer errors when utterances are a better fit for the target relative to the distractor ( $\rho = -0.81$ , bootstrapped 95% CI $= [-0.9, -0.7]$ ; Fig. 6 B). This result suggests that listener behavior is driven by an expectation of speaker informativity: listeners interpret utterances proportionally to how well they fit objects in context. Our Rational Speech Act (RSA) formalization of cooperative reasoning in this context predicts that speakers (directors) naturally increase the informativity of their referring expressions to hedge against the increased risk of misunderstanding; Exp. 1 presents direct evidence in support of this hypothesis. Exp. 2 is consistent with this hypothesis; when directors used underinformative scripted instructions (taken from prior work), listeners made significantly more errors than when speakers were allowed to provide referring expressions at their natural level of informativity, and speaker informativeness strongly modulated listener error rates.
Output (English): Did participants behave unexpectedly?