François CholletVerified account

A maximally efficient communication protocol would look like random noise, out of context (besides error correction mechanisms).

why should human language be maximally efficient?

it shouldn't. The point is that it could, and it would still serve the same purpose.

... maybe I'm being slow, but how should acknowledgement of this fact about efficient communication protocols affect NLP?

you can't understand language without considering it in context: agents communicating about something.

Yes I think this is pretty widely accepted in NLP, see e.g. work from Roth, Mooney, Zettlemoyer, Barzilay, etc +

I can't remember a single NLP paper that included the concept of agent or environment.

here's a random example, would this count? http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1687892 …