# Shades of confusion: Lexical uncertainty modulates ad hoc coordination in an interactive communication task

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2105.06546 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.06546/

## Key facts

- Cited by 5 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 12 of its 103 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 13 May 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 12 of 12)

- [Word Representations via Gaussian Embedding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1412.6623/) (2014)
- [Colors in Context: A Pragmatic Neural Model for Grounded Language Understanding](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.10186/) (2017)
- [From partners to populations: A hierarchical Bayesian account of coordination and convention](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05857/) (2021)
- [Probabilistic FastText for Multi-Sense Word Embeddings](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1806.02901/) (2018)
- [When redundancy is useful: A Bayesian approach to 'overinformative' referring expressions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.08237/) (2019)
- [Color naming reflects both perceptual structure and communicative need](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1805.06165/) (2018)
- [Embedding Words as Distributions with a Bayesian Skip-gram Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.11027/) (2017)
- [Semantic Discriminability for Visual Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2009.03171/) (2020)
- [Estimating Color-Concept Associations from Image Statistics](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.00220/) (2019)
- [Generalizing meanings from partners to populations: Hierarchical inference supports convention formation on networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2002.01510/) (2020)
- [comp-syn: Perceptually Grounded Word Embeddings with Color](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.04292/) (2020)
- [Even the Abstract have Colour: Consensus in Word-Colour Associations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1309.5391/) (2013)

## Built on by (most cited first, 5 of 5)

- [One fish, two fish, but not the whole sea: Alignment reduces language models' conceptual diversity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2411.04427/) (2024)
- [Abstract Visual Reasoning with Tangram Shapes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.16492/) (2022)
- [Concept Alignment](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.08672/) (2024)
- [Semantic uncertainty guides the extension of conventions to new referents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.06539/) (2023)
- [Ad hoc conventions generalize to new referents](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2509.05566/) (2025)

## Abstract (arXiv)

There is substantial variability in the expectations that communication partners bring into interactions, creating the potential for misunderstandings. To directly probe these gaps and our ability to overcome them, we propose a communication task based on color-concept associations. In Experiment 1, we establish several key properties of the mental representations of these expectations, or lexical priors, based on recent probabilistic theories. Associations are more variable for abstract concepts, variability is represented as uncertainty within each individual, and uncertainty enables accurate predictions about whether others are likely to share the same association. In Experiment 2, we then examine the downstream consequences of these representations for communication. Accuracy is initially low when communicating about concepts with more variable associations, but rapidly increases as participants form ad hoc conventions. Together, our findings suggest that people cope with variability by maintaining well-calibrated uncertainty about their partner and appropriately adaptable representations of their own.