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# Tell Me Everything You Know: A Conversation Update System for the Rational Speech Acts Framework

**Authors:** Carolyn Jane Anderson · **Year:** 2021 · **Venue:** SCiL 2021 **Link:** [aclanthology.org/2021.scil-1.22](https://aclanthology.org/2021.scil-1.22/) · **Licence:** [CC BY 4.0](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

[**3** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W3134587333) openalex · 2026-10-19[**1** citations in our library](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/cited-by/anderson-2021-tell-me-everything-you-know/) of the 140673 papers whose bibliographies we read[Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2021](https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2021.scil-1/)[licence](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/)

- [Publisher's page](https://aclanthology.org/2021.scil-1.22/)
- [PDF](https://aclanthology.org/2021.scil-1.22.pdf)
- [DOI 10.7275/j6z3-9k74](https://doi.org/10.7275/j6z3-9k74)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W3134587333)

**Authors (1)**

1. [Anderson, Carolyn Jane](https://openalex.org/A5075492610) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5717-4210) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/144901955) · h 11 · 1133 citations · 68 works

Citations and author metrics from openalex (2026-10-19); authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## What it is about

RSA models normally simulate one utterance; this paper makes them run over many turns. The common ground is a probability distribution over candidate worlds (here persons with features, from the Mutual Friends task), each participant also has private beliefs, and the common ground replaces the world prior inside the RSA speaker and listener. After each turn the pragmatic listener's posterior is added to the prior state with a learning rate (0.2 in the simulations); separate common grounds per participant let misunderstanding and divergence appear, and the learning rate can be raised when a listener's belief entropy is high (an unsure listener learns more). Speakers choose what to say by sampling from their beliefs; two fixes make this cooperative: a belief threshold with a null utterance (a speaker without a firm belief passes instead of contradicting), and a difference-based sampler that prefers the world whose probability the speaker would raise most over the common ground (no repeating what is already shared). There are only illustrative simulations, no data evaluation.

## Ideas

- I1. Keep a common ground apart from the SLM's own memory in the dialogue layer (`world/src/talk.rs`, `world/src/mind.rs`): the set of frames already said in this conversation by either side. Use it as the paper's non-redundancy filter: an answer or explanation does not restate a frame that is already in the common ground, and it states first the remembered frame the other side has not yet heard. Deterministic: frames, not probabilities. Measure by counting repeated frames in the replies of a scripted dialogue test before and after.
- I2. Implement the threshold-and-pass rule for the student: when no remembered frame supports an answer above a fixed score margin, the student says it does not know instead of guessing (the «null utterance»). `world knowledge diagnose` already separates «no option supported (guess)» (29.4% on the Torah course); report the accuracy the student would have on the answered questions if it passed on those, so the trade-off is visible.
- I3. Track per-character belief sets in tales the same way (who saw or was told which frame), as a cheap step towards false-belief questions («Where will Sally look for the ball?»): a Say or perceive frame adds its content to the hearer's set; the narrator's frames go to the reader only. Test on a few hand-written false-belief stories first.
- I4. If `prag/src/rsa.rs` is extended to several turns, update the prior with exact rational arithmetic and a rational learning rate (for example 1/5), so multi-turn games keep the module's exact, reproducible tables.

## For Mova

[38. Dialogue, discourse markers and reported speech](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/languages/en/38-dialogue-and-discourse-markers/) §3 (grounding and common ground), `33-implicature-and-presupposition.md` §9 (RSA). Code: `world/src/talk.rs`, `world/src/mind.rs`, `world/src/knowledge.rs` (pass instead of guess), `prag/src/rsa.rs`. Measures: repeated frames in replies; accuracy on answered questions vs share passed; hand-written false-belief tests.

Topics: [Speech act theory](https://md.mova.elamur.ai/free/en/docs/papers/topics/speech-act-theory/)

## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.7275/j6z3-9k74](https://doi.org/10.7275/j6z3-9k74)

```
@inproceedings{anderson2021tell,
  title = {{Tell Me Everything You Know: A Conversation Update System for the Rational Speech Acts Framework}},
  author = {Anderson, Carolyn Jane},
  booktitle = {Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2021},
  year = {2021},
  doi = {10.7275/j6z3-9k74},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.7275/j6z3-9k74}
}
```

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