arXiv AI

Verbal tics in frontier language models: A critical review of current releases, research evidence, and public discussion

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
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 4

Benchmarking Machine Translation on Chinese Social Media Texts

The paper introduces CSM-MTBench, a benchmark for evaluating machine translation on Chinese social media text. It addresses two main challenges: limited parallel data due to slang and stylistic nuances, and inadequate evaluation metrics that miss these informal features. The benchmark includes two expert-curated subsets—Fun Posts and Social Snippets—and proposes specialized evaluation methods for each, revealing significant differences among over 20 MT models in handling semantic and stylistic aspects.

By Kaiyan Zhao, Zheyong Xie, Zhongtao Miao, Xinze Lyu, Yao Hu, Shaosheng Cao
arXiv AI
Sep 21

CIBuzzBench: A Benchmark for Cross-Lingual Understanding of Chinese Internet Buzzwords

CIBuzzBench is a new benchmark that tests cross‑lingual understanding of Chinese internet buzzwords by providing 3,001 buzzwords with English explanations, equivalents, category labels, and harmfulness annotations. The benchmark defines three tasks—Meaning Explanation, Cross‑lingual Equivalent Matching, and Culturally Grounded Harmfulness Detection—to evaluate how well large language models translate and interpret these culturally nuanced terms. Experiments show that current state‑of‑the‑art LLMs still struggle with fine‑grained non‑literal meanings, robust matching, and accurate harmfulness detection across languages.

By Yifan Wang, Junyu Lu, Qifan Wang, Shun Zhang, Chaozhuo Li, Jiahao Liu, Zhijun Cao, Lingbin Bu, Fanliang Bu
arXiv AI
Jul 7

The Rise of Verbal Tics in Large Language Models: A Systematic Analysis Across Frontier Models

arXiv:2604. 19139v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) continue to evolve through alignment techniques such as Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) and Constitutional AI, a growing and increasingly conspicuous phenomenon has emerged: the proliferation of verbal tics--repetitive, formulaic linguistic patterns that pervade model outputs.

By Shuai Wu, Xue Li, Yanna Feng, Yufang Li, Zhijun Wang, Ran Wang
arXiv AI
Sep 18

KoNeoBench: A Curated Evaluation Dataset for LLM Understanding of Korean Neologisms

KoNeoBench is a curated dataset designed to evaluate large language models’ understanding of Korean neologisms. It contains 1,785 recently attested Korean words from online news since 2020, each accompanied by usage examples, word‑formation analyses, and dictionary‑style definitions. The authors define four evaluation tasks, report results from recent models and a human baseline, and find that current LLMs struggle with recovering source components, distinguishing semantic categories, and generating accurate definitions.

By Soha Lee, Soojin Lee, Heesung Yang, Hyunju Song, Hyunji Lee, Jinsan An, Jeongwan Shin, Jin Hyun Park, Jun Lee, Hyeyoung Park, Kilim Nam
arXiv AI
Aug 28

How LLMs Distort Our Written Language

Large language models (LLMs) are widely used to assist writing, but this study shows they alter both tone and meaning of human text. A user study found that heavy LLM use increased neutral essays by nearly 70% and made writers feel less creative and less in their voice. Even when prompted to make only grammar edits, LLMs changed the semantic content of essays and produced AI-generated scientific reviews that were less focused on clarity and significance and scored higher on average.

By Marwa Abdulhai, Isadora White, Yanming Wan, Ibrahim Qureshi, Joel Z. Leibo, Max Kleiman-Weiner, Natasha Jaques
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 16

EviSI: An Evidence-Based Evaluation Agent for Simultaneous Interpreting

EviSI is an evidence‑based evaluation agent for low‑latency simultaneous speech‑to‑speech translation. It combines Multidimensional Quality Metrics with interpreter‑developed criteria, using shared source evidence to assess four dimensions—Anchor, Event, Logic, and Fluency—while deduplicating verified errors before scoring. On English‑to‑Chinese and Chinese‑to‑English data, EviSI’s rankings correlate strongly with human judgments, outperforming BLEU and COMET, and its multilingual extension maintains these correlations across five language directions.

By Ben Yan, Zongyao Li, Xiaoyu Chen, Daimeng Wei, Weidong Liu, Huan Zhao, Chong Li, Yaode Wang, Yuzhe Shang