---
title: "Learning in the Rational Speech Acts Model — Monroe 2015"
description: "The authors propose learned RSA: the model becomes a statistical classifier in… 25.3% accuracy. 36 references, cited by 31 papers here."
authors: ["Will Monroe", "Christopher Potts"]
year: 2015
venue: "arXiv:1510.06807"
source: "https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.06807"
doi: "10.48550/arxiv.1510.06807"
arxiv: "1510.06807"
licence: "arXiv — non-exclusive licence to distribute"
licence_url: "http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/monroe-2015-learning-rational-speech-acts-model/"
---
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# Learning in the Rational Speech Acts Model

**Authors:** [Will Monroe](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/will-monroe/) and [Christopher Potts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/christopher-e-potts/) · **Year:** 2015 · **Venue:** arXiv:1510.06807 · **Licence:** [arXiv — non-exclusive licence to distribute](http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/)

**Links:** [Publisher's page](https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.06807) · [PDF](https://arxiv.org/pdf/1510.06807) · [DOI 10.48550/arxiv.1510.06807](https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1510.06807) · [arXiv 1510.06807](https://arxiv.org/abs/1510.06807) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2116492379)

**Citations:** 47 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) · [31](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/monroe-2015-learning-rational-speech-acts-model/cited-by/) in our library, of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read

## Summary
The Rational Speech Acts (RSA) model describes pragmatics: the speaker and the listener recursively model each other's intentions and thereby enrich the literal meaning of utterances. However, classical RSA has two shortcomings. The semantic lexicon has to be specified by hand, and the speakers in the model turn out to be more rational than real people. The authors propose learned RSA: the model becomes a statistical classifier in which the intermediate RSA agents act as hidden layers with a nonlinear activation. The model is built on a log-linear literal speaker S0. The model learns the lexicon from data and optimizes its parameters through the likelihood of the pragmatic speaker S1. Thanks to arbitrary features, preferences known from natural language generation can be added to the model, for example the tendency to mention an object's color or type. The model was evaluated on attribute selection for referring expressions in the TUNA corpus. Learned RSA outperforms both pure RSA and an ordinary classifier, most noticeably on the more difficult people subdomain. The work shows that pragmatic reasoning can be learned from data. This opens the way to applying RSA in NLP.

## Key points
- TUNA corpus, singular trials in the furniture and people domains: the target is shown among seven distractors, and the task is to reproduce the multiset of attributes in the description. The metrics are accuracy and multiset Dice, evaluation uses five-fold cross-validation, and significance was tested with the Wilcoxon test.
- Two types of features: basic indicators for "object attribute × message attribute" pairs and generation features (attribute type, pairwise type matches, message size). Only together do they yield the best result.
- The best model, Learned S1 with basic and generation features, achieves 25.3% accuracy and a Dice of .777 overall. Pure RSA s1 achieves only 2.2% and .386.
- On people, the S1 model reaches 22.5% accuracy and a Dice of .764. This is slightly above the best dev result of the 2008 Challenge (.762), although the authors stress that the comparison is informal.
- Pure RSA rarely mentions color and head nouns, while the S0 models underuse informative attributes such as beard and hair. Learned S1 with generation features corrects both systematic errors.

*Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.*

## Institutions

- [Stanford University](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/stanford-university/) — University, Stanford, United States · 434 works · 314,419 citations

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## Cite

Cite as: Will Monroe and Christopher Potts. 2015. Learning in the Rational Speech Acts Model. arXiv:1510.06807.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work.

```bibtex
@misc{monroe2015learning,
  title = {{Learning in the Rational Speech Acts Model}},
  author = {Will Monroe and Christopher Potts},
  year = {2015},
  doi = {10.48550/arxiv.1510.06807},
  eprint = {1510.06807},
  archivePrefix = {arXiv},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.1510.06807}
}
```

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## References

36 references, 5 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet.

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*Updated 1 November 2026*