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Robert Hawkins

Robert Hawkins has 5 papers in our library, in 2019–2025, most of them on English, Language models & pretraining, Question answering; often with Noah D. Goodman, Michael C. Frank, Michael Franke. 2 of them are among the papers read by Mova, the project.

5 papers in our library · 2019–2025

OpenAlex · ORCID · h-index 1 · 19 works · 1 citations OpenAlex, 2026-10-14

📄 5 works in our library · 🔗 Cited 42 times in our library · 5 more in our library without a page yet · ⭐ Paper Stars ranking: #6558

The profile is the library's match of the name; two people with one name are not always told apart.

Elsewhere: Google Scholar · Semantic Scholar · dblp · ACL Anthology

 Affiliations

🎓Stanford UniversityStanford · United States2014–2026 · 6 papersEducation 2014–2019 · PhD, PsychologyEmployment since 2024 · Assistant Professor, Linguisticscurrent🎓University of Wisconsin–MadisonMadison · United States2023–2024Employment 2023–2024 · Assistant Professor, Psychology🎓Princeton UniversityPrinceton · United States2019–2023Employment 2019–2023 · Associate Research Scholar, Princeton Neuroscience Institute🎓Indiana UniversityBloomington · United States2010–2014Education 2010–2014 · BS, Cognitive Science & Mathematics

From the bylines of their papers (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14), ORCID and Wikidata; institutions on papers are matched by machine.

 Fields, topics and concepts

Of its works in our library, with the number of works on each.

📚 Shelves 11The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Arts and Humanities · 5 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 4 worksArtificial Intelligence · 4 worksComputer Science · 4 worksCultural Studies · 1 workExperimental and Cognitive Psychology · 1 workPsychology · 1 workSocial Sciences · 1 workDecision Sciences · 1 workGeneral Decision Sciences · 1 workPhilosophy · 1 work

🧭 Topics 3Research subjects and languages the work is about.English · 2 worksLanguage models & pretraining · 1 workQuestion answering · 1 work

 Works by year

2020s

20252 papers20211 paper20201 paper

2010s

20191 paper

 Papers

The most cited first (OpenAlex and our library).

  1. Characterizing the dynamics of learning in repeated reference games (2019 · 67 citations)
    When two people repeatedly talk about the same hard-to-name objects, their wording changes over time. Hawkins, Frank and Goodman study this process with a large online version of the classic tangram reference game. One player, the director, describes a target shape. The other, the matcher, has to pick it out of…
  2. Continual Adaptation for Efficient Machine Communication (2020 · 38 citations)
    Neural language models can reproduce the conventions in their training data, but unlike people they cannot invent new shorthand with a specific partner during an interaction.
  3. A pragmatic account of the weak evidence effect (2021 · 7 citations)
    The weak evidence effect occurs when an argument that only slightly supports a conclusion leaves listeners less convinced of it.
  4. Comparing human and LLM politeness strategies in free production (2025 · 6 citations)
    The study replicates Yoon et al. (2020) with LLMs. A speaker gives feedback on a performance rated 0–3 hearts, with the goal of being informative, kind, or both, and chooses among «was / wasn't» + terrible, bad, good, amazing. Models of 70B parameters and more reproduce the human pattern (Spearman up to 0.75): with…
  5. Integrating Neural and Symbolic Components in a Model of Pragmatic Question-Answering (2025 · 1 citation)
    The case is over-informative answering: asked «Do you have iced tea?» in a café that has iced coffee, soda and Chardonnay, people answer «No, but we have iced coffee».

All works

10 works of theirs in our library, the most cited first; 5 with a page here, the others link their original until we summarise them.

  1. Characterizing the dynamics of learning in repeated reference gamesCognitive ScienceRobert D. Hawkins, Michael C. Frank, Noah D. Goodman2019 · 67 citations
  2. Continual Adaptation for Efficient Machine CommunicationConference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL)Robert Hawkins, Minae Kwon, Dorsa Sadigh, et al.2020 · 38 citations
  3. A pragmatic account of the weak evidence effectOpen MindSamuel A. Barnett, Thomas L. Griffiths, Robert D. Hawkins2021 · 7 citations
  4. Comparing human and LLM politeness strategies in free productionHaoran Zhao, Robert D. HawkinsEnglish · 6 citations
  5. Accommodation and Epistemic Vigilance: A Pragmatic Account of Why LLMs Fail to Challenge Harmful Beliefs ↗Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · no summary yetMyra Cheng, Robert D. Hawkins, Dan Jurafsky2026 · 4 citations
  6. Cognitive offloading and the speedup illusion in human-AI interaction ↗arXiv (Cornell University) · no summary yetSunny Yu et al.2026 · 1 citation
  7. The efficiency-gain illusion: People underestimate the rate of AI use and overestimate its benefits on simple tasks ↗no summary yetSunny Yu et al.2026 · 1 citation
  8. Integrating Neural and Symbolic Components in a Model of Pragmatic Question-AnsweringPolina Tsvilodub, Robert D. Hawkins, Michael FrankeEnglish · 1 citation
  9. Understanding the Division of Cognitive Effort in Human-AI Interactions ↗no summary yetSunny Yu et al.2026
  10. Understanding When People use AI on Different Cognitive Tasks ↗no summary yetSunny Yu et al.2026

 Co-authors here

5 co-authors with a page, the most papers together first.

Venues

Where their works here were published, the most works first, with the editions of those that have a page.

 Cited by

Papers of our library cite their works 42 times (of the 149,439 papers whose bibliographies we read); 14 citing papers with a page here →.

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