Analysis of Language Change in Collaborative Instruction Following

TL;DR

This paper investigates how language evolves in collaborative instructional tasks, revealing that instructors tend to increase language complexity to improve collaboration with more skilled followers, contrasting prior findings of simplification.

Contribution

It demonstrates that, unlike previous studies, language complexity can increase in instructional settings when utility maximization is considered, highlighting a new dynamic in language evolution.

Findings

Instructors increase language complexity with skill level.

Contrasts prior findings of language simplification.

Highlights importance of utility in language change.

Abstract

We analyze language change over time in a collaborative, goal-oriented instructional task, where utility-maximizing participants form conventions and increase their expertise. Prior work studied such scenarios mostly in the context of reference games, and consistently found that language complexity is reduced along multiple dimensions, such as utterance length, as conventions are formed. In contrast, we find that, given the ability to increase instruction utility, instructors increase language complexity along these previously studied dimensions to better collaborate with increasingly skilled instruction followers.