arXiv AI

Social Meaning in Large Language Models: Structure, Magnitude, and Pragmatic Prompting

arXiv:2604. 02512v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit human-like patterns of pragmatic and social reasoning.

arXiv AI
Sep 10

Beliefs and Behavior in Language Models

arXiv:2609.07943v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: There is significant uncertainty about whether abstractions like beliefs or desires usefully describe the behavior of large language models (LLMs). In...

By Alex Smolin, Bryan Wilder
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Polite but Misaligned: Evaluating LLM Politeness Judgments Against Human Pragmatic Norms

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) assess politeness in ways that match human judgments. Using two English datasets—one with continuous ratings and another with three‑way categorical labels—the authors compare seven LLMs to human annotations. They find that models agree more with each other than with humans, show systematic neutral bias in categorical predictions, and that alignment varies with explicit linguistic cues and rapport‑building strategies.

By Rong Wang, Kun Sun, Yadong Guo
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 24

Polite but Misaligned: Evaluating LLM Politeness Judgments Against Human Pragmatic Norms

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) assess politeness in ways that match human judgments. Using two English datasets—one with continuous ratings and another with three‑way categorical labels—the authors find that LLMs agree more with each other than with humans. They observe that model–human alignment depends on explicit linguistic cues, while misaligned cases often involve rapport‑building strategies. Additionally, models tend to overproduce Neutral labels and underpredict Impolite labels, a pattern that persists even when expert consensus is used as a reference.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 20

Computational models of pragmatic reasoning with flexible generation of meaning and expression alternatives

Pragmatic language use requires reasoning about alternatives: the alternative expressions a speaker might have chosen, or the alternative interpretations a listener might entertain. Formal and computational models of pragmatics must therefore specify the sets of alternatives that interlocutors reason over, which is often done through manual specification.

arXiv AI
Aug 26

SyPS: Measuring Sycophancy Prompt Sensitivity in Large Language Models

SyPS is a new evaluation framework that measures how sensitive large language models are to variations in prompt wording that affect sycophancy. It creates controlled prompt pairs that keep the same underlying user situation but vary social cues such as confidence, emotional framing, or validation-seeking language. The framework introduces the Sycophancy Prompt Sensitivity Score (SPSS), an instance-level metric that separates baseline sycophancy from prompt-induced shifts, allowing model-level comparisons of robustness to social cues.

By Lijia Huang, Yao Fu, Sihao Ren