arXiv AI By Louie Hong Yao, Vishesh Anand, Yuan Zhuang, Tianyu Jiang

Rhetorical Questions in LLM Representations: A Linear Probing Study

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The study investigates how large language models encode rhetorical questions by applying linear probes to two social‑media datasets. It finds that rhetorical signals appear early in the model’s representations, are most stable in last‑token embeddings, and can be distinguished from information‑seeking questions with AUROC 0.7–0.8 even across datasets. However, probes trained on different datasets rank target instances differently, revealing that multiple, distinct linear directions capture various rhetorical cues rather than a single shared representation.

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