This paper presents two experimental findings pertaining to the semantics and pragmatics of superlative modifiers (at least, at most). First, in a scenario with N objects of a given type, speakers consistently judge it true that there are ‘at least N’ and ‘at most N’ objects of that type. This supports the debated position that the ignorance conveyed by superlative modifiers is an implicature, ...

We discuss sincere voting when voters have cardinal preferences over alternatives. We interpret sincerity as opposed to strategic voting, and thus de…ne sincerity as the optimal behavior when conditions to vote strategically diminish. When voting mechanisms allow for only one message type (simple voting mechanisms) we show that eliminating some conditions for strategic voting, individuals’ opti...

Sincerity is important in everyday human communication and perception of genuineness can greatly affect emotions and outcomes in social interactions. In this paper, submitted for the INTERSPEECH 2016 Sincerity Challenge, we examine a corpus of six different types of apologetic utterances from a variety of English speakers articulated in different prosodic styles, and we rate the sincerity of ea...

What counts as evidence that the other side is sincere? Within mainstream international relations literature, scholars have focused on costly signals. We argue, however, that in the real world leaders do not simply look at costly signals, but they rely to an important extent on their personal impressions of other leaders, taking these as credible indicators of sincerity. Our approach thus build...

This essay posits sincerity and humor as linked ways of politicizing the interactions that underpin all ethnographic encounters. This politicization is contrasted with conventional anthropological preoccupations with authenticity (and fetishizations of ethnographic writing), and it demands attention to the human bodies that constitute ethnographic intersubjectivity. Combining a discussion of Ha...

In this work, we investigate the coherence between inferable deception and perceived sincerity in speech, as featured in the Deception and Sincerity tasks of the INTERSPEECH 2016 Computational Paralinguistics ChallengE (ComParE). We demonstrate an effective approach that combines the corpora of both Challenge tasks to achieve higher classification accuracy. We show that the naı̈ve label mapping ...