Thailand

Recent studies have claimed that large language models (LLMs) are capable of drawing pragmatic inferences (Qiu et al., 2023; Hu et al., 2022; Barattieri di San Pietro et al., 2023). The present paper sets out to test LLM&#39;s abilities on atypicality inferences, a type of pragmatic inference that is triggered through informational redundancy. We test several state-of-the-art LLMs in a zero-shot setting and find that LLMs fail to systematically fail to derive atypicality inferences. Our robustness analysis indicates that when inferences are seemingly derived in a few-shot settings, these results can be attributed to shallow pattern matching and not pragmatic inferencing. We also analyse the performance of the LLMs at the different derivation steps required for drawing atypicality inferences – our results show that models have access to script knowledge and can use it to identify redundancies and accommodate the atypicality inference. The failure instead seems to stem from not reacting to the subtle maxim of quantity violations introduced by the informationally redundant utterances.

ACL 2024

Large language models fail to derive atypicality inferences in a human-like manner

pragmatics; informational redun- dancy; human-like reasoning; large language models

Recent studies have claimed that large language models (LLMs) are capable of drawing pragmatic inferences (Qiu et al., 2023; Hu et al., 2022; Barattieri di San Pietro et al., 2023). The present paper sets out to test LLM's abilities on atypicality inferences, a type of pragmatic inference that is triggered through informational redundancy. We test several state-of-the-art LLMs in a zero-shot setting and find that LLMs fail to systematically fail to derive atypicality inferences. Our robustness analysis indicates that when inferences are seemingly derived in a few-shot settings, these results can be attributed to shallow pattern matching and not pragmatic inferencing. We also analyse the performance of the LLMs at the different derivation steps required for drawing atypicality inferences – our results show that models have access to script knowledge and can use it to identify redundancies and accommodate the atypicality inference. The failure instead seems to stem from not reacting to the subtle maxim of quantity violations introduced by the informationally redundant utterances.

workshop paper

### Welcome!
The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

You are required to register for this event. **Please register [here](https://2024.aclweb.org/registration). **

If you have already registered, please check your inbox for an email from Underline granting you access to ACL 2024 content.

Please register!

The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Large language models have complicated internal dynamics, but induce representations of words and phrases whose geometry we can study. Human language processing is also opaque, but neural response measurements can provide (noisy) recordings of activations during listening or reading, from which we can extract similar representations of words and phrases. Here we study the extent to which the geometries induced by these representations, share similarities in the context of brain decoding. We find that the larger neural language models get, the more their representations are structurally similar to neural response measurements from brain imaging.

Structural Similarities Between Language Models and Neural Response Measurements

Fluent speakers make implicit predictions about forthcoming linguistic items while processing sentences, possibly to increase efficiency in real-time comprehension. However, the extent to which prediction is the primary mode of processing human language is widely debated. The human language processor may also gain efficiency by integrating new linguistic information with prior knowledge and the preceding context, without actively predicting. At present, the role of probabilistic integration, as well as its computational foundation, remains relatively understudied. Here, we explored whether a Delayed Recurrent Neural Network (d-RNN, Turek et al., 2020), as an implementation of both prediction and integration, can explain patterns of human language processing over and above the contribution of a purely predictive RNN model. We found that incorporating integration contributes to explaining variability in eye-tracking data for English and Hindi.

Predict but Also Integrate an Analysis of Sentence Processing Models for English and Hindi

Motivated by human cognitive processes, attention mechanism within transformer architecture has been developed to assist neural networks in allocating focus to specific aspects within input data. Despite claims regarding the interpretability achieved by attention mechanisms, the extent of correlation and similarity between machine and human attention remains a subject requiring further investigation. In this paper, we conduct a quantitative analysis of human attention compared to neural attention mechanisms in the context of the anaphora resolution task. We collect an eye-tracking dataset based on the Winograd schema challenge task for the Russian language. Leveraging this dataset, we conduct an extensive analysis of the correlations between human and machine attention maps across various transformer architectures, network layers of pre-trained and fine-tuned models. Our aim is to investigate whether insights from human attention mechanisms can be used to enhance the performance of neural networks in tasks such as anaphora resolution. The results reveal distinctions in anaphora resolution processing, offering promising prospects for improving the performance of neural networks and understanding the cognitive nuances of human perception.

Transformer Attention vs Human Attention in Anaphora Resolution

In this study, we explore the proficiency of large language models (LLMs) in understanding two key lexical aspects: duration (durative/stative) and telicity (telic/atelic). Through experiments on datasets featuring sentences, verbs, and verb positions, we prompt the LLMs to identify aspectual features of verbs in sentences. Our findings reveal that certain LLMs, particularly those closed-source ones, are able to capture information on duration and telicity, albeit with some performance variations and weaker results compared to the baseline. By employing prompts at three levels (sentence-only, sentence with verb, and sentence with verb and its position), we demonstrate that integrating verb information generally enhances performance in aspectual feature recognition, though it introduces instability. We call for future research to look deeper into methods aimed at optimizing LLMs for aspectual feature comprehension.

Evaluating Lexical Aspect with Large Language Models

Babies’ daily auditory environment plays a crucial role in language development. Most previous research estimating the quantitative and qualitative aspects of early speech inputs has predominantly focused on English- and Spanish-speaking families. In addition, validation studies for daylong recordings' analysis tools are scarce on French data sets. In this paper, we present a French corpus of daylong audio recordings longitudinally collected with the LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis) system from infants aged 3 to 24 months. We conduct a thorough exploration of this data set, which serves as a quality check for both the data and the analysis tools. We evaluate the reliability of LENA metrics by systematically comparing them with those obtained from the ChildProject set of tools and by checking the known dynamics of the metrics with age. These metrics are also used to replicate, on our data set, findings from (Warlaumont et al, 2014) about the increase of infants' speech vocalizations and temporal contingencies between infants and caregivers with age

Daily auditory environments in French-speaking infants: A longitudinal dataset

Verbs describe the dynamics of interactions between people, objects, and their environments. They play a crucial role in language formation and understanding. Nonetheless, recent vision-language models like CLIP predominantly rely on nouns and have a limited account of verbs. This limitation affects their performance in tasks requiring action recognition and scene understanding. In this work, we introduce VerbCLIP, a verb-centric vision-language model which learns meanings of verbs based on a compositional approach to statistical machine learning. Our methods significantly outperform CLIP in zero-shot performance on the VALSE, VL-Checklist, and SVO-Probes datasets, with improvements of +2.38\%, +3.14\%, and +1.47\%, without fine-tuning. Fine-tuning resulted in further improvements, with gains of +2.85\% and +9.2\% on the VALSE and VL-Checklist datasets.

VerbCLIP: Improving Verb Understanding in Vision-Language Models

Language complexity is an emerging concept critical for NLP and for quantitative and cognitive approaches to linguistics. In this work, we evaluate the behavior of a set of compression-based language complexity metrics when applied to a large set of native South American languages. Our goal is to validate the desirable properties of such metrics against a more diverse set of languages, guaranteeing the universality of the techniques developed on the basis of this type of theoretical artifact. Our analysis confirmed with statistical confidence most propositions about the metrics studied, affirming their robustness, despite showing less stability than when the same metrics were applied to Indo-European languages. We also observed that the trade-off between morphological and syntactic complexities is strongly related to language phylogeny.

Analysing and Validating Language Complexity Metrics Across South American Indigenous Languages

Psycholinguistic experiments reveal that efficiency of human language use is founded on predictions at both syntactic and lexical levels. Previous models of human prediction exploiting LLMs have used an information theoretic measure called \emph{surprisal}, with success on naturalistic text in a wide variety of languages, but under-performance on challenging text such as garden path sentences. This paper introduces a novel framework that combines the lexical predictions of an LLM with the syntactic structures provided by a dependency parser. The framework gives rise to an \emph{Incompatibility Fraction}. When tested on two garden path datasets, it correlated well with human reading times, distinguished between easy and hard garden path, and outperformed surprisal.

How can large language models become more human?

Emergent language games are experimental protocols designed to model how communication may arise among a group of agents. In this paper, we focus on how to improve performances of neural agents playing a signaling game: a sender is exposed to an image and generates a sequence of symbols that is transmitted to a receiver, which uses it to distinguish between two images, one that is semantically related to the original image, and one that is not. We consider multiple design choices, such as pretraining the visual components of the agents, introducing regularization terms, how to sample training items from the dataset, and we study how these different choices impact the behavior and performances of the agents. To that end, we introduce a number of automated metrics to measure the properties of the emergent language. We find that some implementation choices are always beneficial, and that the information that is conveyed by the agents’ messages is shaped not only by the game, but also by the overall design of the agents as well as seemingly unrelated implementation choices.

So many design choices: Improving and interpreting neural agent communication in signaling games

The symbol grounding problem---how to connect a symbolic system to the outer world---is a longstanding question in AI that has recently gained prominence with the progress made in NLP in general and surrounding large language models in particular. In this article, we study the emergence of semantic categories in the communication protocol developed by neural agents involved in a well-established type of signaling game. In its basic form, the game requires one agent to retrieve an image based on a message produced by a second agent. We first show that the agents are able to, and do, learn to communicate high-level semantic concepts rather than low-level features of the images even from very indirect training signal to that end. Second, we demonstrate that the introduction of an adversarial agent in the game fosters the emergence of semantics by producing an appropriate training signal when no other method is available.

Large language models fail to derive atypicality inferences in a human-like manner

Downloads

Next from ACL 2024

Structural Similarities Between Language Models and Neural Response Measurements

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Large language models fail to derive atypicality inferences in a human-like manner

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from ACL 2024

Structural Similarities Between Language Models and Neural Response Measurements

Stay up to date with the latest Underline news!

PRESENTATIONS

CONFERENCES

COMPANY

RESOURCES

Downloads