arXiv Computation and Language By Wenchang Wang, Yue Song

When the Text Is Silent: Memory Shortcuts and the Validity of LLM Annotation under Evidence Insufficiency

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The study investigates whether large language models (LLMs) rely on textual evidence or on their pre‑existing knowledge when annotating text. Using counterfactual prompts for 995 public figures, the authors find that LLMs often default to memory shortcuts—providing correct facts about a figure even when the text contains no supporting evidence. These shortcuts are amplified by evaluation design and incentives, but can be mitigated by name reminders or masking, though with trade‑offs in gender annotation.

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