The communicative function of ambiguity in language.

By S. Piantadosi, Harry J. Tily, Edward Gibson. 2011

520 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We present a general information-theoretic argument that all efficient communication systems will be ambiguous, assuming that context is informative about meaning. We also argue that ambiguity allows for greater ease of processing by permitting efficient linguistic units to be re-used. We test predictions of this theory in English, German, and Dutch. Our results and theoretical analysis suggest that ambiguity is a functional property of language that allows for greater communicative efficiency. This provides theoretical and empirical arguments against recent suggestions that core features of linguistic systems are not designed for communication.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Cultural Studies

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Citations in the corpus

The Hanabi Challenge: A New Frontier for AI Research (2019, background): “signiﬁcant ﬁnancial support for this work that could have inﬂuenced its outcome.”
Consequences of the Now-or-Never bottleneck for signed versus spoken languages (2015, background): “It is conceivable that the presence of ambiguities may be a necessary component of an efficient communication system, in which easy-to-produce chunks are reused – thus becoming ambiguous – in a trade-off between ease of production and difficulty of comprehension (Piantadosi et al. 2012).”
Compositionality and Generalization In Emergent Languages (2020, background): “We might add that, while there is a huge difference between our simple emergent codes and natural languages, the latter are not perfectly disentangled either, as they feature extensive lexical ambiguity, typically resolved in a phrasal context (Piantadosi et al., 2012).”
Minimal Requirements for the Emergence of Learned Signaling (2014, background): “Human lexicons are not optimal but are supported by contextual cues to disambiguate words which would be ambiguous out of context (e.g., Piantadosi, Tily, & Gibson, 2012); Why, then, are we looking for reliable optimality when it does not appear in natural language?”
So Much to Read, So Little Time (2016, background): “Even people reading sentences via RSVP at 720 wpm appear to generate sound-based representations of the words (Petrick, 1981).”
How language production shapes language form and comprehension (2012, background): “Instead, communicative efficiency is higher when the producer uses short ambiguous words and permits phonological reduction and substantial additional ambiguity (Piantadosi et al., 2012).”