arXiv Computation and Language

The Imperfective Paradox in Large Language Models

arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

The Imperfective Paradox Is Not Necessarily in Large Language Models: A Benchmark Failure Before a Model Failure

The paper critiques a recent NLI benchmark that tests the imperfective paradox, arguing that the benchmark suffers from conceptual and evaluation mis-specifications, notably Aspectual Reduction and a lack of strict NLI standards. The authors re-evaluate the benchmark, identify mis-specifications, and construct lexically matched minimal pairs to control for lexical variation. Their experiments reveal that models often exhibit a Sufficiency Bias, accept simple‑past hypotheses without affirming culmination, and that prompting interventions shift label decisions without improving true semantic understanding, highlighting additional failure modes such as compositional aspectual classification errors and surface‑form attraction.

By Kaiqiao Han, Yizhou Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Modelling Adjectival Modification Effects on Semantic Plausibility

The paper investigates how adjectival modifiers affect the semantic plausibility of events, using the Adept benchmark of 16,000 English sentence pairs that differ by a single adjective. Experiments show that sentence transformers, despite being conceptually suited to the task, underperform compared to models like RoBERTa. The authors provide an error analysis and discuss the implications of their findings for future work on balancing training and test data.

By Anna Golub, Beate Zywietz, Annerose Eichel
arXiv AI
Jul 16

Not All Needles Are Found: How Fact Distribution and Don't Make It Up Prompts Shape Retrieval, Reasoning, and Hallucination in Long-Context LLMs

arXiv:2601. 02023v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) increasingly utilize massive context windows as working memory for autonomous tasks, their reliability fluctuates significantly depending on how information is distributed in real-world corpora.

By Amirali Ebrahimzadeh, Seyyed M. Salili
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 16

Explanation Generation for Contradiction Reconciliation with LLMs

The paper introduces a new task called reconciliatory explanation generation, where large language models (LLMs) must produce explanations that make contradictory statements compatible. It proposes reusing natural language inference datasets and new quality metrics for scalable evaluation. Experiments with 13 LLMs show limited success, especially when longer reasoning chains are involved, but reinforcement‑learning training improves performance on two narrative reasoning benchmarks.

By Jason Chan, Zhixue Zhao, Robert Gaizauskas
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.

Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 14

The Illusion of Robustness: Aggregate Accuracy Hides Prediction Flips under Task-Irrelevant Context

As large language models (LLMs) grow more capable, they are increasingly deployed in context-rich settings where task inputs are often accompanied by long, partially irrelevant context. In a controlled setting, we find that state-of-the-art models often appear robust to task-irrelevant context at the aggregate level: prepending it to benchmark questions causes little change in overall accuracy.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Modeling the Developmental Shift in Telicity Acquisition

The study introduces a Difference in Surprisal method that uses GPT‑2 token surprisal to automatically label telicity in English CHILDES corpora, validated against expert judgments. Logistic regression classifiers trained on 12 syntactic and lexical semantic features reveal that child speech achieves near‑perfect telicity classification using a single deterministic cue—the presence of a post‑verbal determiner—whereas adult speech relies more on verb class and other lexical semantic features, with the determiner cue neutralized. This developmental trajectory supports syntactic bootstrapping, showing that learners initially exploit high‑frequency structural cues before developing fully compositional, verb‑based event structures.

By Ellie Xia, Parisa Kordjamshidi, Alan Hezao Ke