Regularized Conventions: Equilibrium Computation as a Model of Pragmatic
  Reasoning
Athul Paul Jacob Gabriele Farina Jacob Andreas
We present a model of pragmatic language understanding, where utterances are
produced and understood by searching for regularized equilibria of signaling
games. In this model (which we call ReCo, for Regularized Conventions),
speakers and listeners search for contextually appropriate utterance--meaning
mappings that are both close to game-theoretically optimal conventions and
close to a shared, ''default'' semantics. By characterizing pragmatic
communication as equilibrium search, we obtain principled sampling algorithms
and formal guarantees about the trade-off between communicative success and
naturalness. Across several datasets capturing real and idealized human
judgments about pragmatic implicatures, ReCo matches or improves upon
predictions made by best response and rational speech act models of language
understanding.