Eva Yan


2022

pdf bib
Analysis of Language Change in Collaborative Instruction Following
Anna Effenberger | Eva Yan | Rhia Singh | Alane Suhr | Yoav Artzi
Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2022

2021

pdf bib
Analysis of Language Change in Collaborative Instruction Following
Anna Effenberger | Rhia Singh | Eva Yan | Alane Suhr | Yoav Artzi
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2021

We analyze language change over time in a collaborative, goal-oriented instructional task, where utility-maximizing participants form conventions and increase their expertise. Prior work studied such scenarios mostly in the context of reference games, and consistently found that language complexity is reduced along multiple dimensions, such as utterance length, as conventions are formed. In contrast, we find that, given the ability to increase instruction utility, instructors increase language complexity along these previously studied dimensions to better collaborate with increasingly skilled instruction followers.