arXiv Computation and Language

Does Linguistic Structure Enrichment Enhance Coherence Assessment? Not With Current Architectures

The paper examines whether adding syntactic and rhetorical structure to text can improve the prediction of incoherence in large language model outputs. Experiments show that plain text actually yields higher accuracy, as the added structural information conflicts with the models’ architectures. The authors also demonstrate that coherence assessment can help detect misleading content by applying zero‑shot experiments to a Brazilian disinformation dataset.

arXiv Computation and Language
4d ago

When Context Misleads: Surprisal, Energy and Attention Entropy as Metrics of Coherence Illusions in LLMs

The study examines whether Dutch language models exhibit coherence‑illusion effects similar to human readers, using texts that refer back to earlier context with words like ‘again’ and ‘too’. Surprisal at the critical word aligns with human acceptability and eye‑tracking data, showing that models are more surprised by incoherent continuations unless a matching distractor is present. Attention entropy and an energy metric from associative‑memory literature reveal heads that behave differently under coherence versus incoherence, and ablating these heads demonstrates transfer effects across experiments, indicating a shared underlying mechanism.

By Ece Takmaz, Nitin Kumar, Li Kloostra, Jakub Dotlacil
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 31

Diverging Transformer Predictions for Human Sentence Processing: A Comprehensive Analysis of Agreement Attraction Effects

The study evaluates eleven autoregressive transformer models on English agreement attraction scenarios using a surprisal-based approach. Results show that while transformers match human reading times for prepositional phrase configurations, they perform poorly on object‑extracted relative clauses, with predictions diverging across models and failing to capture human interference patterns. The authors argue that current transformers cannot adequately model human morphosyntactic processing and call for more rigorous, comprehensive testing to avoid misleading conclusions from limited syntactic setups.

By Titus von der Malsburg, Sebastian Pad\'o
arXiv AI
Sep 1

Using Prosody to Predict Syntactic Structure

arXiv:2608.30260v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: While it is well-established that prosody carries crucial cues for syntactic structure, the degree and nature of correspondence between these two dom...

By Junghyun Min, Alex Warstadt, Tamar I. Regev, Tiago Pimentel, Ethan Gotlieb Wilcox
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
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 22

Exposure is Optional: Learning Unlike Coordination in Language Models

Coordination, a fundamental linguistic structure, remains a subject of intense debate, and its exact nature continues to elude theoretical linguistics. A common view holds that only same-category constituents can be conjoined, which has been challenged by the many grammatical unlike coordinations found in natural language.

arXiv Computation and Language
3d ago

An Empirical Analysis of Factual Errors in Human-Written Text and Its Application to Factual Error Detection

The paper presents an empirical study of factual errors in human-written text, focusing on corrections in newspaper articles to build a taxonomy of common mistakes such as kanji misconversions and unit errors. It evaluates large language models’ ability to detect these errors, finding that even advanced models like GPT‑5.4 achieve only a 52% word‑level F1 score on synthetic data, underscoring the difficulty of the task. The work highlights the gap in research on factual error detection in human writing compared to LLM hallucinations.

By Kazuma Iwamoto, Kazumasa Omura, Shotaro Ishihara