arXiv Computation and Language

The Concrete-Arbitrary Gap: Kinship Reasoning in LLMs Is Not Indifferent to Presentation

arXiv AI
Sep 24

Recognized but Not Produced: A Generation Benchmark for Culturally Specific Kinship Terms

The paper introduces a generation benchmark for culturally specific kinship terms, evaluating five open‑weight large language models (LLMs) on Hindi, Tamil, and Korean. Unlike prior multiple‑choice tests that treat kinship understanding as a recognition task, the study prompts LLMs to generate terms across two communicative tasks and compares results to a matched option‑supported baseline. Findings show that while models like GPT‑OSS120B and Llama‑3.370B can select correct terms in over 90% and 78% of cases respectively, they produce the correct term only 36% and 24% of the time, indicating a significant evaluation‑format gap and highlighting the difficulty of culturally specific kinship generation even when relationships are explicitly stated.

By Sahil Pardasani, Madhusudan Singh
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Sep 3

Typological Feature Prediction with Large Language Models: An In-Context Learning Approach

The paper explores how large language models (LLMs) can predict typological features using an in-context learning approach with data from URIEL+ and Glottolog. Zero‑shot prompting alone is inadequate, but providing phylogenetic and geographic neighbour evidence enables LLMs to outperform all baselines, even for low‑resource languages. Additionally, most LLM rationales align with the supplied evidence, suggesting a move toward explainable typological predictions.

arXiv AI
Aug 28

Do Language Models Follow Occam's Razor? An Evaluation of Parsimony in Inductive and Abductive Reasoning

The paper investigates whether large language models (LLMs) follow Occam's Razor when performing inductive and abductive reasoning. It introduces a synthetic framework for generating questions that require both types of reasoning and a new automated metric to evaluate the simplicity and correctness of generated hypotheses. Experiments show that while LLMs can handle simple scenarios, they struggle with complex world models and producing high‑quality, simplest hypotheses, even when using advanced reasoning techniques.

By Yunxin Sun, Abulhair Saparov
arXiv AI
Sep 3

Thinking effort aligns between humans and reasoning models in abductive reasoning

The study examines how the effort expended by large reasoning models (LRMs) compares to that of humans during abductive reasoning tasks. By analyzing reaction times and reasoning traces, the authors find that LRMs and humans exhibit similar patterns of effort and error types. They also demonstrate that decoding strategies allowing models to explore multiple reasoning paths further align the models’ reasoning costs with human effort.

By Henry Arthur