Human linguistic communication is based on a variety of inferences that we draw from sentences, often going beyond what is literally said. While there is wide agreement on the basic distinction between entailments, implicatures, and presuppositions, their boundaries are continuously being re-drawn and the status of many inferences remains open. In this paper, we focus on three inferences of plain and embedded disjunctions, and compare them with regular implicatures. We investigate this comparison from the novel perspective of the predictions of state-of-the-art Large Language Models, using the same experimental paradigms as recent studies investigating the same inferences with humans. The results of our best performing models mostly align with those of humans, both in the large differences we find between those inferences and regular implicatures, as well as in fine-grained distinctions among different aspects of those inferences.

Authors:

Polina Tsvilodub: University of Tübingen; Paul Marty: University of Malta; Sonia Ramotowska: University of Amsterdam; Jacopo Romoli: Heinrich Heine Universität Düsseldorf; Michael Franke: University of Tübingen