Simple reference games are of central theoretical and empirical importance in
the study of situated language use. Although language provides rich,
compositional truth-conditional semantics to facilitate reference, speakers and
listeners may sometimes lack the overall lexical and cognitive resources to
guarantee successful reference through these means alone. However, language
also has rich associational structures that can serve as a further resource for
achieving successful reference. Here we investigate this use of associational
information in a setting where only associational information is available: a
simplified version of the popular game Codenames. Using optimal experiment
design techniques, we compare a range of models varying in the type of
associative information deployed and in level of pragmatic sophistication
against human behavior. In this setting, we find that listeners' behavior
reflects direct bigram collocational associations more strongly than
word-embedding or semantic knowledge graph-based associations and that there is
little evidence for pragmatically sophisticated behavior by either speakers or
listeners of the type that might be predicted by recursive-reasoning models
such as the Rational Speech Acts theory. These results shed light on the nature
of the lexical resources that speakers and listeners can bring to bear in
achieving reference through associative meaning alone.

研究了在语境中只提供联想信息的情况下，参考游戏中所用的联想信息类型和用于实现信息参考的词汇资源和语言习得者的实用策略，在听者行为中发现直接二元组关联的策略比词向量或语义知识图谱关联更适用，发现很少有理性言语行为的迹象。