WHO:	Kristen Skovbroten , BCS Graduate Student: Advisor- Michael Tanenhaus
TOPIC:	To name or not to name? That's not the question: how speakers use referring expressions to distinguish between shared and privileged knowledge
ABSTRACT:	The distinction between shared and privileged information is important during interactive conversation. How speakers formulate referring expressions is ideally guided by what they think their interlocutor knows and will be able to understand. However, gathering information from multiple sources and constantly coordinating them to make this determination could be computationally too complex to affect production in real time. Previous work has suggested that speakers use heuristics rather than track the distinction between shared and privileged information (Wu & Keysar 2007), but we demonstrate that speakers are quite effective in tracking this distinction and mark it in the form of their utterances.
WHEN:	11/4/2009 12:00:00 PM
WHERE:	Meliora 269

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