Least Effort and Alignment in Task‐Oriented Communication
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 7725855 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Polyphony Bruna (0009-0008-0875-2318, Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences University of California, Merced, corresponding author), Christopher T Kello (0000-0003-1588-9474, University of California, Merced), Christopher Kello (Department of Cognitive and Information Sciences University of California, Merced) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 49 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | e70062-e70062 |
| Publication date | 2025-04-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | Yes |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Cognitive Science (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0364-0213 • E-ISSN: 1551-6709 |
| Publisher | Wiley (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1111/cogs.70062 |
| PMID | 40270106 |
| OpenAlex | W4409733464 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 67 |
Conversational partners align the meanings of their words over the course of interaction to coordinate and communicate. One process of alignment is lexical entrainment, whereby partners mirror and abbreviate their word usage to converge on shared terms for referents relevant to the conversation. However, lexical entrainment may result in inefficient mimicry that does not add new information, suggesting that task‐oriented communication may favor alignment through other means. The present study investigates the process of alignment in Danish conversations in which dyads learned to categorize unfamiliar “aliens” using trial‐and‐error feedback. Performance improved as dyad communication became less verbose, measured as a decrease in the entropy of word usage. Word usage also diverged between partners as measured by Jensen−Shannon Divergence, which indicates that alignment was not achieved through lexical entrainment. A computational model of dyadic communication is shown to account for the alien game results in terms of joint least effort. The model shows that alignment of partner referents can increase as a result of minimizing both the joint entropy of dyadic word usage and the conditional entropy of individual referents given the joint signal distribution. We conclude that the principle of least effort, originally proposed to shape language evolution, may also support alignment in task‐oriented communication
Categorization · Natural language processing · Computer Science · Language and cultural evolution · Speech and dialogue systems · Topic Modeling · Artificial Intelligence
Truth and Interpretation
Becoming syntactic.
Conceptual pacts and lexical choice in conversation.
Syntactic persistence in language production
Looking To Understand
Alignment as a consequence of expectation adaptation
Optimally Interacting Minds
The persistence of structural priming
Dialog as interpersonal synergy
On phonetic convergence during conversational interaction
Grounding in communication.
Coming to Terms
Predicting Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Games
Common ground at the understanding of demonstrative reference
Welcome to the Tidyverse
Human behavior and the principle of least effort.
Zipf’s law revisited
An information-theoretic analysis of targeted regressions during reading
The communicative function of ambiguity in language
Philosophical investigations
Convention
Changes in repeated references
Linguistic alignment between people and computers
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |