Natural Language Communication

Natural language communication research focuses on understanding and replicating how humans use language to achieve communicative goals, encompassing both human-human and human-machine interactions. Current research emphasizes developing models that account for the nuanced communicative intentions embedded in language, moving beyond purely symbolic representations to incorporate contextual factors and the influence of social dynamics, including language contact and formality. This work leverages various approaches, including transformer-based models and agent-based simulations, to improve machine understanding of language and facilitate more natural and effective human-computer interaction, with applications ranging from task-oriented dialogue systems to collaborative problem-solving and improved machine translation.