Pragmatic language use requires reasoning about alternatives: the alternative expressions a speaker might have chosen, or the alternative interpretations a listener might entertain. Formal and computational models of pragmatics must therefore specify the sets of alternatives that interlocutors reason over, which is often done through manual specification.
arXiv:2604. 02512v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit human-like patterns of pragmatic and social reasoning.
By Roland M\"uhlenbernd
The paper examines how users’ prompts to large language models evolve over time, applying speech act and politeness theory to a corpus of 2,000 English prompts from 2023 and 2025. It finds a shift toward more indirect, implicit, and fragmentary directive speech acts, with a notable 14.9‑percentage‑point drop in explicit propositional content and a decline in politeness markers. This suggests users increasingly rely on the model’s inferential abilities, treating it as a competent implicature resolver.
By Kristina \v{S}ekrst, Virna Karli\'c
arXiv:2603. 19997v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the separation of literal interpretation from contextual inference in a collaborative block-building tasks, where an agent must resolve underspecified instructions using context.
By Natalia Bila, Kata Nasz\'adi, Alexandra Mayn, Christof Monz
Indirect speech acts (ISAs) require pragmatic reasoning over context, as directive intent can- not be inferred from surface form alone. Prior text-based studies and existing multimodal benchmarks larg...
arXiv:2608.30270v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Indirect speech acts (ISAs) require pragmatic reasoning over context, as directive intent can- not be inferred from surface form alone. Prior text-base...
By Jaehee Kim, Ji Hoon Chung, Seoyoon Park, Unsol Kim, Kyungwon Park, Ji Hak Kim, Yi-Jun Chen, Hansaem Kim