Towards functional, agent-based models of dogwhistle communication

Robert Henderson, Elin McCready


Abstract
Henderson and McCready 2017, 2018, 2019 build a novel theory of so-called ‘dogwhistle’ communication by extending the social meaning games of Burnett 2017. This work reports on an ongoing project to build systems to model the evolution of dogwhistle communication in a population based on probability monads (Erwig and Kollmansberger, 2006; Kidd, 2007). The ultimate results will be useful not just for dogwhistles, but modeling the diffusion and evolution of social meaning in populations in general. The initial results presented here is a computational implementation of Henderson and McCready 2018, which will serve as the basis for models with multiple speakers and repeated interactions.
Anthology ID:
2020.pam-1.10
Volume:
Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020)
Month:
June
Year:
2020
Address:
Gothenburg
Editors:
Christine Howes, Stergios Chatzikyriakidis, Adam Ek, Vidya Somashekarappa
Venue:
PaM
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
73–77
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.pam-1.10
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Robert Henderson and Elin McCready. 2020. Towards functional, agent-based models of dogwhistle communication. In Proceedings of the Probability and Meaning Conference (PaM 2020), pages 73–77, Gothenburg. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards functional, agent-based models of dogwhistle communication (Henderson & McCready, PaM 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.pam-1.10.pdf