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.
arXiv:2604. 02512v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit human-like patterns of pragmatic and social reasoning.
By Roland M\"uhlenbernd
The paper examines how users’ prompts to large language models evolve over time, applying speech act and politeness theory to a corpus of 2,000 English prompts from 2023 and 2025. It finds a shift toward more indirect, implicit, and fragmentary directive speech acts, with a notable 14.9‑percentage‑point drop in explicit propositional content and a decline in politeness markers. This suggests users increasingly rely on the model’s inferential abilities, treating it as a competent implicature resolver.
By Kristina \v{S}ekrst, Virna Karli\'c
arXiv:2603. 19997v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: We investigate the separation of literal interpretation from contextual inference in a collaborative block-building tasks, where an agent must resolve underspecified instructions using context.
By Natalia Bila, Kata Nasz\'adi, Alexandra Mayn, Christof Monz
Indirect speech acts (ISAs) require pragmatic reasoning over context, as directive intent can- not be inferred from surface form alone. Prior text-based studies and existing multimodal benchmarks larg...
arXiv:2608.30270v1 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Indirect speech acts (ISAs) require pragmatic reasoning over context, as directive intent can- not be inferred from surface form alone. Prior text-base...
By Jaehee Kim, Ji Hoon Chung, Seoyoon Park, Unsol Kim, Kyungwon Park, Ji Hak Kim, Yi-Jun Chen, Hansaem Kim
The paper investigates the role of minimal responses—short, empathic utterances—in psychological counseling, noting that such brief replies are common in human dialogues but underrepresented in large language model (LLM) outputs. Using a two‑stage filtering approach and contextual verification with an LLM, the authors systematically analyze minimal responses across multiple counseling datasets. They find that while strong commercial LLMs can produce minimal replies when prompted, they often fail to judge when these replies are appropriate, and counseling‑specific models trained on synthetic data tend to generate longer, content‑rich responses instead.
By Zhiyang Qi
arXiv:2603.22161v3 Announce Type: replace
Abstract: Metacognition -- assessing the quality of one's own cognitive performance -- guides adaptive behavior across species. Substantial research demonstr...
By Dharshan Kumaran, Nathaniel Daw, Simon Osindero, Petar Veli\v{c}kovi\'c, Viorica Patraucean
The paper introduces a benchmark for testing large language models (LLMs) on their ability to infer social pragmatic meanings in indirect and playful Chinese online comments. Using over 200,000 public social media interactions, the authors created 4,735 human-validated diagnostic items that pair a target comment with its preceding context and plausible misreadings. Eight LLMs were evaluated in a cross-writer setting, with the best model achieving 81.42% leave-writer-out accuracy, while human accuracy reached 90.8%. The study finds that models can detect broad irony or playfulness but often misidentify the specific mechanism or interactional move.
By Shiwei Hong, Junjie Ma, Emma Jiren Wang, Ethan Z. Rong, Siying Hu, Haichang Li, Ziying Wang, Zhicong Lu
arXiv:2604. 22027v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: One of the most common complaints about large language models (LLMs) is their prompt sensitivity -- that is, the fact that their ability to perform a task or provide a correct answer to a question can depend unpredictably on the way the question is posed.
By Zhuonan Yang, Jacob Xiaochen Li, Francisco Piedrahita Velez, Eric Todd, David Bau, Michael L. Littman, Stephen H. Bach, Ellie Pavlick
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...
By Julia Witte Zimmerman, Calla G. Beauregard, Tabia Tanzin Prama, Parisa Suchdev, Kathryn Cramer, Elisabeth Kollrack
arXiv:2607. 03882v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: LLMs are increasingly deployed as post-hoc explainers of AI-generated outputs, yet it remains unclear whether they can reliably communicate probabilistic information in natural language.
By Diego Cerda-Mardini, Sarath Chandar, Sreenath Madathil