Pragmatic Language Understanding

Pragmatic language understanding focuses on how context and social cues shape the interpretation of language, going beyond literal meaning to encompass implicatures, social conventions, and speaker intent. Current research investigates this through computational modeling, often employing game-theoretic frameworks and large language models (LLMs) to predict and analyze pragmatic inferences across diverse languages and social contexts, including political discourse and conversational dynamics in film. These efforts aim to improve the ability of AI systems to understand nuanced human communication, with implications for applications ranging from improved chatbots and virtual assistants to more sophisticated natural language processing tools.