Archive Electronique - Institut Jean Nicod
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1997 research outputs found
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When do people dislike self-enhancers? When they claim to be superior
No full textInternational audienceWhen do people dislike self-enhancers? When they claim to be superior Abstract. Self-enhancing statements can provide useful information. Why do we resent those who make them? We suggest that the resentment comes from a broader claim of superiority that self-enhancing statements can imply. In three experiments, we compared one condition, designed such that the self-enhancing claim would be perceived as a claim of superiority, to three conditions providing different contextual reasons for why the self-enhancing claim might not be a claim of superiority. In those conditions the self-enhancing claim is either called for, addressed to someone who performs better than the self-enhancer, or addressed to someone who doesn't compete in the domain mentioned of the self-enhancing claim. The results show that participants disliked the self-enhancer more and were more likely to deem the self-enhancing claim to be a brag when the self-enhancing claim was manipulated to be a claim of superiority
Digging Communicative Intentions: The Case of Crises Events
No full textInternational audienceIn emergency situations users of social networks convey all sorts of what have been called communicative intentions, well-known since the work of Austin (1962) and Searle (1969) as speech acts (SA). While speech acts have been the focus of close scrutiny in the philosophical and linguistic literature (see (Portner, 2018) for extended discussion), their role has been only rarely understood and exploited in processing social media content about crisis events, our focus here. Current work on communicative intentions in social media are topic-oriented, focusing on the correlation between SA and specific topics such as crisis (e.g., earthquakes) but also politics, celebrities, cooking, travel, etc. It has been observed that people globally tend to react to natural disasters with SA distinct from those used in other contexts (e.g., celebrities, which are essentially made up of comments). Here, we explore the further hypothesis of a correlation between different SA types and urgency and propose an in depth linguistic and computational analysis of communicative intentions in tweets from an urgency-oriented perspective. Indeed, SA are mostly relevant to identify intentions, desires, plans and preferences towards action and to ultimately produce a system intended to help rescue teams. Our contribution is four-fold and consists of: (1) A two-layer annotation scheme of speech acts both at the tweet and sub-tweet levels, (2) A new French dataset of about 13K tweets annotated for both urgency and SA, targeting both expected (e.g., storms) and unexpected or sudden (e.g., building collapse, explosion) events, (3) A thorough analysis of the annotations studying in particular the correlation between SA and the urgency of the message, SA and intentions to act categories (e.g., human damages), and SA and crisis types, finally, (4) A set of deep learning experiments to detect SA in crises related corpora. Our results show a strong correlation between SA and urgency annotations at both the tweet and sub-tweet levels with a particular salient correlation in the latter case, which constitutes a first important step towards SA-aware NLP-based crisis management on social media
Effects of causal structure and evidential impact on probabilistic reasoning
No full textInternational audienceWe compare two perspectives on base-rate neglect (Kahneman & Tversky, 1973) in probabilistic judgment. The evidential impact perspective derives it from humans’ focus on the impact of evidence on belief, rather than conditional probabilities. The Causal Models perspective derives it from humans’ inability to integrate information that is causally opaque, as base-rates often are in such experiments. Because causal and evidential-impact relations are often concomitant and confounded, we designed an experiment that specifically teases apart their respective influence on probabilistic judgment. Our results support a combination of the two perspectives, with causal transparency influencing the degree to which one engages in evidential impact reasoning strategies
Modelling contrast and feature inventory: The nature of [web] in French Sign Language
No full textInternational audienceSign language feature-based models use distinctive features to describe the phonological structure of signs. We use near-minimal pairs and phonological processes like productivity and neutralisation in French Sign Language to show that the feature [web], which refers to the webbing part of the fingers, should be (re)introduced in the list of phonologically active features. In discussing potential cases of [web] in other sign languages and the impact on the shape of phonological inventories, we first offer an account of [web] in terms of a location feature in line with most traditional feature-geometry models. We then offer some speculations on why a more uniform characterisation of [web] and the features in the same subclass in terms of the orientation type results in more economical models
Authority, Legitimacy and the Expert Layman Problem
No full textInternational audienceExpertise is ubiquitous in contemporary societies. We are epistemically dependent on the knowledge of experts on many different issues. This poses several problems for democracy. Where do the authority and legitimacy of expertise come from? Experts are not elected: they are appointed by governments or recruited by media to give their opinion on important issues such as health, security and environment. Their opinion is preferred to that of the average citizen and is used by governments for prescribing policies that impact the whole society (see the restriction measures taken by most governments during Covid-19). In this chapter, I analyze the role of experts in democracy and the obstacles to their acceptance by the citizens, given that they violate two principles of democracy: neutrality, that is the idea that the State should not prefer a specific opinion on the others, and equality, that is, one person, one vote, independently of their cognitive capacities
Tolerance and degrees of truth
No full textInternational audienceThis paper explores the relations between two logical approaches to vagueness: on the one hand the fuzzy approach defended by Smith (2008), and on the other the strict-tolerant approach defended by Cobreros, Egré, Ripley and van Rooij (2012). Although the former approach uses continuum many values and the latter implicitly four, we show that both approaches can be subsumed under a common three-valued framework. In particular, we defend the claim that Smith's continuum many values are not needed to solve what Smith calls `the jolt problem', and we show that they are not needed for his account of logical consequence either. Not only are three values enough to satisfy Smith's central desiderata, but they also allow us to internalize Smith's closeness principle in the form of a tolerance principle at the object-language. The reduction, we argue, matters for the justification of many-valuedness in an adequate theory of vague language
Scope ambiguities in future questions: reflection and queclamative with Italian MICA
No full textThe paper studies the interpretation of Italian future questions with and without MICA. While bare future questions are reflective and enhance uncertainty, MICA future questions reveal bias, if not mirativity, and are exclamative in nature. We argue that these differences are grounded in a difference in scope. When FUT scopes over QUES, the question becomes reflective and enhances un-answerability. When QUES embeds the modal FUT the resulting interpretation is ill-formed. MICA offers the content needed to repair the question, contributing an alternative. This alternative has an expressive status whose content is adjoined by expressive application, and is thereby highlighted, with the enhancement of bias. Our paper offers three main insights: (i), modals, like attitudes, can embed sets of propositions. (iii) Expressive content can be adjoined to questions, creating an exclamative biased questions, which we call queclamative. (iii) Italian MICA belongs to the broad class of mirative evidentials sensitive to defeasible generalization rather than to the one of common ground management devices
Event completion: a test case for theories of reference in memory
No full textInternational audienceAlthough we encounter objects from a particular perspective, what we perceive and remember are typically whole objects. In ‘amodal completion’ our mind automatically fills in objects’ spatially occluded parts, and our memory then often discards infor- mation about the orientation from which the objects were perceived. An analogous phenomenon of ‘event completion’ has been demonstrated, which may be understood as the mind automatically filling in temporally occluded parts of events. Exemplifying typical experiments in this paradigm, Strickland and Keil (Strickland and Keil, Cog- nition 121:409–415, 2011) showed participants videos depicting a causal event (e.g., someone kicking a ball), which was edited so that a crucial part was missing (e.g., the moment of contact between foot and ball). Subjects were more likely to falsely remember having seen the moment of contact if (and only if) it was strongly implied by subsequent footage. We use this phenomenon of event completion as a test case for comparing different theories of reference in memory. We argue that event com- pletion puts pressure on both pure causal and pure descriptive theories of reference, and favors more nuanced hybrids of causal and descriptive theories, which integrate insights from cognitive and epistemic approaches
Prompt Selection Matters: Enhancing Text Annotations for Social Sciences with Large Language Models
No full textLarge Language Models have recently been applied to text annotation tasks from social sciences, equalling or surpassing the performance of human workers at a fraction of the cost. However, no inquiry has yet been made on the impact of prompt selection on labelling accuracy. In this study, we show that performance greatly varies between prompts, and we apply the method of automatic prompt optimization to systematically craft high quality prompts. We also provide the community with a simple, browser-based implementation of the method at https://prompt-ultra.github.io/
Both learning and syntax recognition are used by great tits when answering to mobbing calls
No full textInternational audienceMobbing behavior, in addition to its complex cooperative aspects, is particularly suitable to study the mechanisms implicated in heterospecific communication. Indeed, various mechanisms ranging from pure learning to innate recognition have been proposed. One promising yet understudied mechanism could be syntax recognition, especially given the latest works published on syntax comprehension in birds. In this experiment, we test whether great tits use both learning and syntax recognition when responding to heterospecifics. In the first part of the experiment, we demonstrate that great tits show different responses to the same heterospecific calls depending on their sympatric status. In the second part, we explore the impact of reorganizing the notes of the heterospecific mobbing calls to fit the syntax of great tits. Great tits showed an increased mobbing response toward the heterospecific calls when they shared their own call organization. Our results corroborate the recent finding that syntactic rules in bird calls may have a strong impact on their communication systems and enlighten how various mechanisms can be used by the same species to respond to heterospecific calls