We present a formal game-theoretic model towards the explanation of implicatures based on the computation of iterated best responses: literal meaning of signals constitutes their default interpretation, and rational communicators decide about their communicative strategies by iteratively calculating the best response to this default strategy. We demonstrate by means of several examples how the ...

In this paper we introduce two methods for deriving the intentional structure of complex questions. Techniques that enable the derivation of implied information are also presented. We show that both the intentional structure and the implicatures enabled by it are essential components of Q/A systems capable of successfully processing complex questions. The results of our evaluation support the c...

Despite the ubiquity of conventional implicatures in language and critical role they play argumentation, have heretofore been almost entirely absent from theories argument linguistic expression reasoning. In this paper, we discuss (cis) as an interesting phenomenon at interface semantics, pragmatics argumentation by harnessing research semantics extending existing account for diagramming with t...

There is a controversial debate about which implicatures are triggered by logically complex sentences. This article introduces a novel experimental paradigm based on a game-theoretic design to test these implicatures. In particular, we investigated two cases adjudicating between different accounts of implicature (“Each girl found some of her marbles” and “Some of the girls found some of their m...

Most studies of implicatures focused on conversational implicatures. This study, however, examined the conventional implicature induced by but. According to the literature, one can assume that the second argument in a ‘p but q’ construction is the argument with the most weight. This is, however, never experimentally tested with a direct distancingcontrastive but. We presented participants with ...

Traditional question answering systems adopt the following framework: parsing questions, searching for relevant documents, and identifying/generating answers. However, this framework does not work well for questions with hidden assumptions and implicatures. In this paper, we describe a novel idea, a cascading guidance strategy, which can not only identify potential traps in questions but furthe...

I give a new account of neg-raising with belief predicates as scaleless implicatures, inferences that are predicted by grammatical theories scalar when quantifier projects subdomain alternatives but no alternative. argue the inference should be treated an implicature because parallels observed in its distribution and other known cases implicatures (namely typical free choice effects, reported i...

By contrast, the global implicature in (1c), though entailed by (1b), does not have a similar corresponding implicature of the embedded clause when it appears unembedded. For this reason, the local/global distinction is relevant only in complex sentences. In simplex sentence such as (2a) the local and global implicatures are one and the same. The fact that (1a) has the local implicature in (1b)...

Pragmatic inferences require listeners to use alternatives to arrive at the speaker's intended meaning. Previous research has shown that intonation interacts with alternatives but not how it does so. We present two mouse tracking experiments that test how pitch accents affect the processing of ad hoc scalar implicatures in English. The first shows that L+H* accents facilitate implicatures relat...