arXiv Computation and Language By William Sheffield, Jiahui Chen, Amy Zhang, Alex Warstadt, Junyi Jessy Li, Kanishka Misra

Not Just an Evaluation: A Case Study of Discourse Particle Sensitivity in Language Models

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The paper studies how large language models (LLMs) handle the discourse particles "just" and "only" in natural conversation. Behavioral experiments show that both humans and LLMs prefer these particles and are more sensitive to "just" than "only", while instruction tuning enhances this sensitivity. Mechanistic analysis identifies specific units in the models that respond to each particle, revealing an asymmetric overlap in their internal representations.

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