arXiv Computation and Language

Do we need to answer that question? Salience and Answerability of Potential Questions in Naturalistic Dialogue

The study examines whether the salience of automatically generated potential questions in naturalistic dialogue predicts whether they are answered. Using a dataset of 7,124 questions from the British National Corpus, the authors find a weak but significant positive correlation between salience and answerability, weaker than in monologic text. They also note that more structured interactions show stronger agreement among annotators than less organized dialogues.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 24

Granuscore: A Reference-Free Measure of Granularity for Text Analysis and Question Answering

Granuscore is a reference‑free metric that measures the granularity of text by exploiting the structure of a hierarchical embedding space. It successfully reproduces known hierarchical orderings on the Granola‑EQ dataset, distinguishes granularity across different discourse contexts, and explains sentence‑specificity variations beyond sentence length. The authors also apply Granuscore to four question‑answering benchmarks, revealing systematic differences in granularity among questions, gold answers, and model outputs, thereby offering a new lens for assessing QA dataset difficulty.

By Lukas Ellinger, Alexander Fichtl, Miriam Ansch\"utz, Georg Groh
arXiv AI
Jul 31

Ask don't tell: Reducing sycophancy in large language models

arXiv:2602. 23971v4 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Sycophancy, the tendency of large language models to favour user-affirming responses over critical engagement, has been identified as an alignment failure, particularly in high-stakes advisory and social contexts.

By Magda Dubois, Cozmin Ududec, Christopher Summerfield, Lennart Luettgau
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jul 6

SPEARBench: A Benchmark for Naturalness Evaluation in Streaming Speech-to-Speech Language Models

Streaming speech-to-speech language models aim to answer spoken queries directly with synthetic speech. However, standard speech and text benchmarks do not capture whether these systems behave naturally in conversations, where timing, turn-taking, prosody, interpersonal stance, language and dialect consistency, and relationship-aware appropriateness jointly shape perceived quality.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 25

Likelihood Ranking doesn't Scale Like Prompting in LLMs

The paper compares two common ways of evaluating large language models (LLMs): prompting them to answer questions directly and scoring candidate answers using likelihood-based metrics. The authors introduce a new protocol that ranks declarative statements derived from question–answer pairs, and test it across 95 decoder-only models (0.1B–104B parameters) on 10 multiple-choice QA datasets. They find that while prompted answering accuracy improves sharply with model scale and instruction tuning, statement‑likelihood ranking accuracy stays relatively stable, indicating that the two evaluation methods probe different aspects of model behavior.

By Alessandro Bondielli, Lucia Passaro, Davide Bacciu, Alessandro Lenci
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 17

Reading Between the Lines: Can LLMs Discover the Question Behind the Text?

The paper introduces "question archaeology," an evaluation task that asks models to infer the single, authentic question that motivated a text. It presents a new dataset of commissioned texts paired with their original research questions and distractors, and evaluates both proprietary and open‑source LLMs. Results show newer models outperform older ones, with BERT-based models lagging, and current LLMs even surpassing human performance on this task.

By Claudiu Creanga, Liviu P. Dinu
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 14

CueMem: Cue-Guided Context Reconstruction for Long-Term Conversational Memory

CueMem is a cue‑guided framework for long‑term conversational memory that reconstructs query‑relevant dialogue context from compressed memory records. Instead of treating memory units as self‑contained evidence, it extracts fine‑grained cues linked to their source turns and, at query time, expands from these cues over a turn graph to rebuild a compact evidence context. Experiments on LoCoMo and LongMemEval show that CueMem outperforms baseline memory methods, reduces input tokens and latency, and improves long‑term conversational question answering.

By Changjian Wang, Rongzhen Li, Weili Guan, Shuming Shi, Quan Lu, Ning Jiang
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

A Tri-Agent Framework for Evaluating and Aligning Question Clarification Capabilities of Large Language Models

The paper presents a tri‑agent framework for evaluating large language models’ question‑clarification abilities. It involves a Question Clarifying Agent that identifies ambiguities and asks follow‑up questions, a Respondent Agent that simulates human replies, and an Evaluator Agent that judges the dialogue using metrics such as ambiguity handling, question quality, dialogue efficiency, language appropriateness, and intent alignment. The authors illustrate the approach with synthetic supply‑chain data and discuss validating the evaluator against human judgments.

By Yikai Zhao, Saurabh Pandey, Pradeep Kumar Misra