arXiv:2607. 18570v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Discourse relations provide document structure, critical to language understanding and enabling language model performance and ethicality.
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.
The study investigates whether pretrained transformer models encode functional words—such as pronouns and adverbs—in a way that mirrors human usage. By comparing embeddings of nouns with those of their functional counterparts in both isolated and parallel sentences, the authors find that functional words occupy a central yet distinct position in embedding space and that parallel lexicalized and functional sentences reside in different subspaces. Experiments show that only a mixed training set of functional and lexicalized sentences reveals shared syntactic and semantic structure, whereas training on either type alone fails to capture this parallelism.
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.
The paper argues that language operates with two parameters: amplitude, which measures how often words co‑occur, and phase, a signed relational factor that determines how co‑activated meanings combine and can reverse a meaning’s contribution. Unlike amplitude, phase is not captured by standard word embeddings or transformer attention weights and is indexed to individuals and dyadic interactions. The authors propose six empirical predictions to test phase’s role and suggest that future language models should incorporate agent‑indexed, phase‑bearing semantic states.
arXiv:2606. 15733v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Instruction-tuned language models can answer the same causal-reasoning question differently after its English variable names are replaced by type-preserving placeholders, although the structural causal model and the gold answer are unchanged.
The paper investigates how language models avoid overgeneralizations by distinguishing between two types of indirect negative evidence: preemption and entrenchment. Through controlled rearing experiments on models trained on child‑caregiver conversations, the authors find that models do not exhibit verb‑specific preemption but show weak abstract preemption. Analysis of training dynamics suggests that competing structures act as indirect positive evidence rather than negative in the verb‑specific condition.
Pragmatic language use requires reasoning about alternatives: the alternative expressions a speaker might have chosen, or the alternative interpretations a listener might entertain. Formal and computational models of pragmatics must therefore specify the sets of alternatives that interlocutors reason over, which is often done through manual specification.
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.
The paper studies structural priming in language model production by conducting controlled sentence‑completion experiments on dative constructions. Results show that language models exhibit priming effects, especially when sentences are semantically coherent, with stronger relative increases for double‑object datives and larger absolute increases for prepositional‑object datives. The study also finds that primed completions involve more lexico‑semantic repetition, indicating that priming operates across syntactic, lexical, and semantic levels.
arXiv:2603. 20381v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Understanding the fundamental mechanisms governing the production of meaning in the processing of natural language is critical for designing safe, thoughtful, engaging, and empowering human-agent interactions.
arXiv:2609.34187v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The strong version of the stochastic parrot argument claims that, although large language models (LLMs) may exceed rote regurgitation, they c...