arXiv Computation and Language

WiC is Not WSD: A Study on LLMs and Lexical Ambiguity Resolution

The paper investigates why Word-in-Context (WiC) remains difficult for language models, suggesting that the lack of an explicit sense inventory contributes to the challenge. By evaluating open LLMs on both WiC and traditional Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) tasks, the authors find that providing candidate senses—akin to WSD—consistently improves WiC performance. Human evaluation indicates that many WiC errors stem from label ambiguity or mismatched sense boundaries, with models often over‑discriminating senses and making overly fine‑grained distinctions.

arXiv AI
Sep 15

Domain-Specific Jargon in Large Language Models: A Comparative Analysis between General-Purpose and Specialist Models

The paper investigates how large language models handle domain-specific jargon, comparing a general-purpose Llama‑3.1 with a version fine‑tuned on medical data. Two new medical jargon benchmarks reveal that the general model actually outperforms the fine‑tuned variant, and interpretability tools show the fine‑tuned model over‑emphasizes a few components linked to jargon predictions. Reweighting these components narrows the performance gap, and some jargon‑sensitive components also aid materials‑science tasks, indicating a partially domain‑agnostic representation of specialized terminology.

By Darin Keng, Zhewei Sun
arXiv AI
Aug 24

MGAL: A Multilingual Granularity-Aware Long-Context Benchmark

MGAL is a new multilingual benchmark for evaluating long‑context large language models, built from United Nations reports in six official UN languages and covering 8K to 128K tokens. It tests four linguistic granularities—word, sentence, paragraph, and document—while also stratifying examples by their position within the document (begin, middle, end). Experiments show that models excel at word‑level tasks but struggle with coarser granularity, and that closed‑source models outperform others in lower‑resource languages, revealing challenges such as local semantic crowding and a fluency‑consistency gap.

By Chunhan Li, Chenglin Xu, Zongyang Zhang, Jiale Liu, Zhuoxi Rao, Xudong Jia, Junxiu He, Menglin Yang, Wenjuan Gong, Zhengzhe Liu, Chengwei Qin
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 22

The Origins of Stochasticity: Comprehensive Investigations on Uncertainty Quantification for Large Language Models

Recent advancements in Large Language Models (LLMs) have enabled sophisticated reasoning and content generation, yet their inherent stochasticity poses significant challenges for ensuring predictive credibility. While traditional uncertainty taxonomy paradigms, such as the dichotomy of aleatoric and epistemic uncertainties, provide conceptual foundations, they often fail to capture the multi-component and multi-stage nature of LLM generation and struggle to evaluate the effectiveness of various Uncertainty Quantification (UQ) methods.

arXiv AI
Sep 7

From Answers to Interpretations: Rethinking Ambiguity-Induced Aleatoric Uncertainty Estimation in LLMs

The paper challenges the common practice of estimating aleatoric uncertainty in large language models (LLMs) by generating multiple clarified inputs and comparing the resulting answers. It argues that answers are unnecessary, costly, and can introduce epistemic leakage, proposing instead a clarification-only method that directly assesses ambiguity from the space of plausible interpretations. Experiments on three benchmarks show the new approach improves AUROC, reduces computational cost, and yields uncertainty estimates less correlated with epistemic uncertainty.

By Omer Nahum, Niv Nayman, Jonathan Fhima, Alon Zolfi, Jeremy Levy, Shai Mazor, Paolo Favaro
arXiv AI
Sep 2

Inspicio: Open-Vocabulary, LLM-Based Sense Retrieval for Historical Languages

Inspicio is an open‑vocabulary pipeline that links tokens in historical or low‑resource languages to synsets in the Open English WordNet without needing a source‑language sense inventory. It uses an instruction‑tuned LLM to generate two English translations, candidate dictionary definitions, and English lemmas, then performs hybrid retrieval combining dense definition similarity, sparse lemma matching, and Maximal Marginal Relevance re‑ranking. Evaluated on Latin, Ancient Greek, PREMOVE, and Italian data, the best configuration achieves 96% Recall@50 on a perception‑verb test set and remains competitive in out‑of‑domain and cross‑lingual scenarios.

By Michele Ciletti
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 22

The BD-LSC Dataset: Facilitating the Benchmarking of Models for Lexical Semantic Change Detection in Slang and Standard Usage

The BD-LSC dataset introduces a bi‑directional lexical semantic change benchmark that tracks sense gain, loss, and stability across three time periods, while the ST‑WSD dataset offers fine‑grained, instance‑level sense annotations for words that blend slang and standard usage. These resources enable systematic evaluation of diverse models—including unsupervised clustering, supervised learning, transformer‑based approaches, and large language models—on tasks such as exact sense matching and multi‑label accuracy. The evaluation shows that few‑shot GPT‑4o performs best overall, yet all systems struggle with rare slang senses, highlighting a key open challenge in the field.

By Afnan Aloraini, Riza Batista-Navarro
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 10

SWORD: Wikidata-based Distortions Reveal Hidden Cross-Lingual Inconsistencies in LLM Factual Error Rejection

SWORD is a new benchmark that tests large language models’ ability to reject factually incorrect statements across eight major languages by distorting Wikidata triples. The benchmark reveals that models often perform better on semantically plausible distortions than on random ones, indicating a reliance on distributional familiarity rather than true factual verification. It also shows significant performance drops for East Asian languages, with gaps up to 28 percentage points, highlighting asymmetric multilingual factual reasoning capabilities.

By Sanghyeok Park, Minji Kang, Hosung Kwak, Jinhyuk Yun