Related papers: Do Language Models' Words Refer?

Distributional semantics is the linguistic theory that a word's meaning can be derived from its distribution in natural language (i.e., its use). Language models are commonly viewed as an implementation of distributional semantics, as they…

Large Language Models (LLMs) have become capable of generating highly fluent text in certain languages, without modules specially designed to capture grammar or semantic coherence. What does this mean for the future of linguistic expertise…

Languages are shaped by the inductive biases of their users. Using a classical referential game, we investigate how artificial languages evolve when optimised for inductive biases in humans and large language models (LLMs) via Human-Human,…

How might messages about large language models (LLMs) found in public discourse influence the way people think about and interact with these models? To explore this question, we randomly assigned participants (N = 470) to watch short…

Animacy - whether an entity is alive and sentient - is fundamental to cognitive processing, impacting areas such as memory, vision, and language. However, animacy is not always expressed directly in language: in English it often manifests…

This paper delves into the capabilities of large language models (LLMs), specifically focusing on advancing the theoretical comprehension of chain-of-thought prompting. We investigate how LLMs can be effectively induced to generate a…

The use of Large Language Models (LLMs) has become ubiquitous, with abundant applications in computational creativity. One such application is fictional story generation. Fiction is a narrative that occurs in a story world that is slightly…

Large language models (LLMs) are demonstrably capable of cross-lingual transfer, but can produce inconsistent output when prompted with the same queries written in different languages. To understand how language models are able to…

Large language models (LLMs) trained purely on text ostensibly lack any direct perceptual experience, yet their internal representations are implicitly shaped by multimodal regularities encoded in language. We test the hypothesis that…

Human languages have evolved to be structured through repeated language learning and use. These processes introduce biases that operate during language acquisition and shape linguistic systems toward communicative efficiency. In this paper,…

Machine-learned language models have transformed everyday life: they steer us when we study, drive, manage money. They have the potential to transform our civilization. But they hallucinate. Their realities are virtual. This note provides a…

Large language models (LLMs) are a promising venue for natural language understanding and generation tasks. However, current LLMs are far from reliable: they are prone to generate non-factual information and, more crucially, to contradict…

Large Language Models (LLMs) such as GPT-4 produce compelling responses to a wide range of prompts. But their representational capacities are uncertain. Many LLMs have no direct contact with extra-linguistic reality: their inputs, outputs…

State-of-the-art language models (LMs) are notoriously susceptible to generating hallucinated information. Such inaccurate outputs not only undermine the reliability of these models but also limit their use and raise serious concerns about…

Large Language Models (LLMs) are commonly criticized for not understanding language. However, many critiques focus on cognitive abilities that, in humans, are distinct from language processing. Here, we instead study a kind of understanding…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit compelling linguistic behaviour, and sometimes offer self-reports, that is to say statements about their own nature, inner workings, or behaviour. In humans, such reports are often attributed to a…

Large-scale pretrained language models (LMs) are said to ``lack the ability to connect utterances to the world'' (Bender and Koller, 2020), because they do not have ``mental models of the world' '(Mitchell and Krakauer, 2023). If so, one…

Language models (LMs) are used for a diverse range of tasks, from question answering to writing fantastical stories. In order to reliably accomplish these tasks, LMs must be able to discern the modal category of a sentence (i.e., whether it…

A lively ongoing debate is taking place, since the extraordinary emergence of Large Language Models (LLMs) with regards to their capability to understand the world and capture the meaning of the dialogues in which they are involved.…

What can large language models learn? By definition, language models (LM) are distributions over strings. Therefore, an intuitive way of addressing the above question is to formalize it as a matter of learnability of classes of…