Related papers: Do Language Models' Words Refer?
Language models (LMs) are trained on collections of documents, written by individual human agents to achieve specific goals in an outside world. During training, LMs have access only to text of these documents, with no direct evidence of…
Language models can produce fluent, grammatical text. Nonetheless, some maintain that language models don't really learn language and also that, even if they did, that would not be informative for the study of human learning and processing.…
What does learning to model relationships between strings teach large language models (LLMs) about the visual world? We systematically evaluate LLMs' abilities to generate and recognize an assortment of visual concepts of increasing…
In this paper, we offer a simple argument for the conclusion that the outputs of large language models (LLMs) are meaningless. Our argument is based on two key premises: (a) that certain kinds of intentions are needed in order for LLMs'…
The widespread success of large language models (LLMs) has been met with skepticism that they possess anything like human concepts or meanings. Contrary to claims that LLMs possess no meaning whatsoever, we argue that they likely capture…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly impacting human society, particularly in textual information. Based on more than 30,000 papers and 1,000 presentations from machine learning conferences, we examined and compared the words used…
The performance of Large language models (LLMs) across a broad range of domains has been impressive but have been critiqued as not being able to reason about their process and conclusions derived. This is to explain the conclusions draw,…
Large Language Models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT demonstrated the potential to replicate human language abilities through technology, ranging from text generation to engaging in conversations. However, it remains controversial to what extent…
Language models (LMs) are said to be exhibiting reasoning, but what does this entail? We assess definitions of reasoning and how key papers in the field of natural language processing (NLP) use the notion and argue that the definitions…
While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence,…
Do large language models (LLMs) make human-like linguistic generalizations? Dentella et al. (2023) ("DGL") prompt several LLMs ("Is the following sentence grammatically correct in English?") to elicit grammaticality judgments of 80 English…
Large language models (LLMs) have multilingual capabilities and can solve tasks across various languages. However, we show that current LLMs make key decisions in a representation space closest to English, regardless of their input and…
In a recent paper, Mandelkern & Linzen (2024) - henceforth M&L - address the question of whether language models' (LMs) words refer. Their argument draws from the externalist tradition in philosophical semantics, which views reference as…
Language is typically modelled with discrete sequences. However, the most successful approaches to language modelling, namely neural networks, are continuous and smooth function approximators. In this work, we show that Transformer-based…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are huge artificial neural networks which primarily serve to generate text, but also provide a very sophisticated probabilistic model of language use. Since generating a semantically consistent text requires a…
Language models (LMs) trained on large quantities of text have been claimed to acquire abstract linguistic representations. Our work tests the robustness of these abstractions by focusing on the ability of LMs to learn interactions between…
Large Language Models are useless for linguistics, as they are probabilistic models that require a vast amount of data to analyse externalized strings of words. In contrast, human language is underpinned by a mind-internal computational…
Language models (LMs) can exhibit human-like behaviour, but it is unclear how to describe this behaviour without undue anthropomorphism. We formalise a behaviourist view of LM character traits: qualities such as truthfulness, sycophancy, or…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly applied in the fields of mechanical engineering and materials science. As models that establish connections through the interface of language, LLMs can be applied for step-wise reasoning through…
Several machine learning methods aim to learn or reason about complex physical systems. A common first-step towards reasoning is to infer system parameters from observations of its behavior. In this paper, we investigate the performance of…