Cooperation, Communication, and Pragmatics
1 Course information
| Lecture Times | Thursdays 10am-11:30am (with a few exceptions; see below) |
| Lecture Location | 46-5193 |
| Class webpage | http://www.mit.edu/~rplevy/teaching/2016fall/9.S916/ |
2 Instructor information
| Instructor | Roger Levy (rplevy@mit.edu) |
| Instructor's office | 46-3033 |
| Instructor's office hours | Wednesdays 10:00-11:30am (subject to change) |
3 Course Description
An individual human mind can pull off remarkable feats, but collections of human minds working together are capable of even more. Every day we overcome – and capitalize on! – differences in our abilities, goals, and knowledge states to act cooperatively and communicate successfully with each other in a wide variety of contexts. Understanding what knowledge, belief structures, and computational capabilities undergird successful cooperation and communication among humans is a problem of fundamental scientific importance in human cognition, and is a crucial stepping stone to designing intelligent artificial systems that can interact effectively with us. In this seminar we will read and discuss a range of foundational and cutting-edge literature on this topic, drawing from diverse fields including psychology, linguistics, artificial intelligence, evolutionary theory, and economics. Special attention will be given to pragmatics, which lies at the intersection of cooperation and communication and has seen particularly rich growth in computational models and experimental methods over the past several years.
4 Course organization
We'll meet once a week and discuss a mixture of foundational, landmark, and bleeding-edge papers in this interdisciplinary field. Seminar participants will take turns leading discussion of readings.
We will finalize scheduling of this course at the end of week 1, based on availability of interested parties. Please indicate your availability at http://whenisgood.net/bnmxxrw – thank you!
5 Intended Audience
Graduate students and highly motivated, well-prepared undergraduates in brain & cognitive sciences, linguistics, artificial intelligence, and any of a number of related disciplines. Postdocs and faculty are also welcome (though I won't let you out of the requirement that you lead discussion of some readings).
There are no formal prerequisites for this seminar. A number of the papers we will be reading have considerable technical depth, and we will delve into the details. So be ready to do some math (mostly high-school algebra plus basic probability theory). Having enough programming experience to implement some of the models we discuss will be an advantage. The programming involved will not be technically complex and any high-level language (Python, Matlab, R, …) would be suitable.
6 Syllabus (subject to modification)
| Week | Day | Topic | Key Readings | Presenter | Homework | Related Readings |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Week 1 | Thurs 8 Sep | Informal discussion of a game-theory classic | Schelling, 1960, chapters 4-6 | HW1, due 15 Sep (ungraded); HW1 solution | ||
| Week 2 | Thurs 15 Sep | Recent survey articles | Rand & Nowak, 2013; Goodman & Frank, in press | Roger (handout) | Steels, 2003 | |
| Week 3 | Tues 20 Sep | Foundations: philosophy | Bratman, 1992 | Maddie (handout) | ||
| Week 4 | Thurs 29 Sep | Foundations: evolutionary biology and political science | Axelrod, 1986 | Dae (handout) | HW2, due 13 Oct (graded!); HW2 solution | Ostrom, 2000 |
| Week 5 | Thurs 6 Oct | Foundations: language and pragmatics | Grice, 1975 | Luke (handout) | ||
| Week 6 | Thurs 13 Oct; | Grounding in Communication | Clark & Brennan, 1991 | Manushaqe (handout) | Garrod & Anderson, 1987, Garrod & Doherty, 1984 | |
| Week 7 | Tues 18 Oct | Comparative biology and evolution of human cooperation | Tomasello et al., 2012 | Tobi (handout) | ||
| Week 8 | Thurs 27 Oct | Towards Flexible Teamwork | Tambe, 1997 | Vaibhav (handout; (slides) | ||
| Week 9 | Thurs 3 Nov | Indirect speech acts | Pinker et al., 2008 | Meilin (handout) | HW3, due 10 Nov (graded!) | |
| Week 10 | Thurs 10 Nov | Communicating with instantaneous conventions | Misyak et al., 2016 | Kelsey | Misyak et al., 2014; Rohde et al., 2012 | |
| Week 11 | Thurs 17 Nov | Signaling trustworthiness | Jordan et al., 2016 | Sarah | Hoffman et al., 2015 | |
| Week 12 | Tues 22 Nov | Costly Punishment | Henrich et al., 2006 | Edmond | Jordan et al., 2016 | |
| Week 13 | Thurs 1 Dec | Pragmatic development and language understanding | Hochstein et al., 2016 | Laine & Athulya | ||
| Week 14 | Thurs 8 Dec | Non-literal language | Kao et al., 2014 (PNAS) | Brittney (handout) | Yoon et al., 2016; Kao et al., 2014 (CogSci Proceedings) | |
| Week 15 | Tues 13 Dec | Learning language games through interaction | Wang et al, 2016 | Mika | Barlier et al., 2015 | |
| Wed 14 Dec | Final paper due |
7 Requirements & grading
The requirements for participation in this seminar are that:
- You show up
- You participate in discussion
- You lead discussion of one or more papers at some point during the quarter, which involves preparing a handout and using it to:
- summarize the main points of the paper;
- walk us through any models and/or experiments;
- lead critical discussion of the paper.
You should go over the handout with me at least two days before the day of your class.
- If you are taking the course for credit, you must:
- complete periodic small homework assignments that I will give at various points throughout the quarter;
- write a final paper in the form of a research proposal on some topic in this course.
8 Mailing list
There will be a mailing list for this course, which you can access at https://mailman.mit.edu:444/mailman/listinfo/9.s916-2016-fall. Please make sure you're signed up for it! This list is both for discussion of ideas in the class and for communications about organizational issues.