Related papers: Use of probabilistic phrases in a coordination gam…
Words of estimative probability (WEPs), such as ''maybe'' or ''probably not'' are ubiquitous in natural language for communicating estimative uncertainty, compared with direct statements involving numerical probability. Human estimative…
Probabilistic forecasts are becoming more and more available. How should they be used and communicated? What are the obstacles to their use in practice? I review experience with five problems where probabilistic forecasting played an…
Accurately predicting the future would be an important milestone in the capabilities of artificial intelligence. However, research on the ability of large language models to provide probabilistic predictions about future events remains…
Language models (LMs) are statistical models trained to assign probability to human-generated text. As such, it is reasonable to question whether they approximate linguistic variability exhibited by humans well. This form of statistical…
_Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions,…
Spoken communication occurs in a "noisy channel" characterized by high levels of environmental noise, variability within and between speakers, and lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Given these properties of the received linguistic input,…
Verbal probability phrases are often used to express estimated risk. In this study, focus was on the numerical interpretation of 29 Dutch probability and frequency phrases, including several complementary phrases to test (a)symmetry in…
A Large Language Model (LLM) is an artificial intelligence system that has been trained on vast amounts of natural language data, enabling it to generate human-like responses to written or spoken language input. GPT-3.5 is an example of an…
Bayesian inference systems should be able to explain their reasoning to users, translating from numerical to natural language. Previous empirical work has investigated the correspondence between absolute probabilities and linguistic…
Humans are able to communicate in sophisticated ways with only sparse signals, especially when cooperating. Two parallel theoretical perspectives on cooperative communication emphasize pragmatic reasoning and joint utility mechanisms to…
The ability to combine linguistic guidance from others with direct experience is central to human development, enabling safe and rapid learning in new environments. How do people integrate these two sources of knowledge, and how might AI…
At the beginning of 2022, a simplistic word-guessing game took the world by storm and was further adapted to many languages beyond the original English version. In this paper, we examine the strategies of daily word-guessing game players…
We show that a GPT-3 model can learn to express uncertainty about its own answers in natural language -- without use of model logits. When given a question, the model generates both an answer and a level of confidence (e.g. "90% confidence"…
This study investigates whether large language models, specifically GPT4, can match human capabilities in analogical reasoning within strategic decision making contexts. Using a novel experimental design involving source to target matching,…
Are the predictions of humans and language models affected by similar things? Research suggests that while comprehending language, humans make predictions about upcoming words, with more predictable words being processed more easily.…
The established language for statistical testing --- significance levels, power, and p-values --- is overly complicated and deceptively conclusive. Even teachers of statistics and scientists who use statistics misinterpret the results of…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in uncertain, sequential decision-making contexts. Yet it remains poorly understood whether the behaviors they exhibit in such environments reflect principled…
Despite widespread success in language understanding and generation, large language models (LLMs) exhibit unclear and often inconsistent behavior when faced with tasks that require probabilistic reasoning. In this work, we present the first…
When humans cooperate, they frequently coordinate their activity through both verbal communication and non-verbal actions, using this information to infer a shared goal and plan. How can we model this inferential ability? In this paper, we…
Automated reasoning about uncertain knowledge has many applications. One difficulty when developing such systems is the lack of a completely satisfactory integration of logic and probability. We address this problem directly. Expressive…