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Related papers: Scope Ambiguities in Large Language Models

200 papers

Lexical ambiguity is widespread in language, allowing for the reuse of economical word forms and therefore making language more efficient. If ambiguous words cannot be disambiguated from context, however, this gain in efficiency might make…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-05-29 Tiago Pimentel , Rowan Hall Maudslay , Damián Blasi , Ryan Cotterell

Language models that are trained on the next-word prediction task have been shown to accurately model human behavior in word prediction and reading speed. In contrast with these findings, we present a scenario in which the performance of…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-10-24 Aditya R. Vaidya , Javier Turek , Alexander G. Huth

Human language defines the most complex outcomes of evolution. The emergence of such an elaborated form of communication allowed humans to create extremely structured societies and manage symbols at different levels including, among others,…

Physics and Society · Physics 2014-03-14 Ricard V. Solé , Luís F. Seoane

Ambiguous words are often found in modern digital communications. Lexical ambiguity challenges traditional Word Sense Disambiguation (WSD) methods, due to limited data. Consequently, the efficiency of translation, information retrieval, and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 T. G. D. K. Sumanathilaka , Nicholas Micallef , Julian Hough

In this work, we study a critical research problem regarding the trustworthiness of large language models (LLMs): how LLMs behave when encountering ambiguous narrative text, with a particular focus on Chinese textual ambiguity. We created a…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2026-04-17 Xinwei Wu , Haojie Li , Hongyu Liu , Xinyu Ji , Ruohan Li , Yule Chen , Yigeng Zhang

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-09 Daniel N. Nissani

Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-04-27 Benedetta Cevoli , Chris Watkins , Yang Gao , Kathleen Rastle

Human bilinguals often use similar brain regions to process multiple languages, depending on when they learned their second language and their proficiency. In large language models (LLMs), how are multiple languages learned and encoded? In…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-26 Jannik Brinkmann , Chris Wendler , Christian Bartelt , Aaron Mueller

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.…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-11 James A. Michaelov , Benjamin K. Bergen

Recent claims suggest that large language models (LMs) underperform humans in comprehending minimally complex English statements (Dentella et al., 2024). Here, we revisit those findings and argue that human performance was overestimated,…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-05-15 Adele E Goldberg , Supantho Rakshit , Jennifer Hu , Kyle Mahowald

Sentences with multiple quantifiers often lead to interpretive ambiguities, which can vary across languages. This study adopts a cross-linguistic approach to examine how large language models (LLMs) handle quantifier scope interpretation in…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-09-16 Shaohua Fang , Yue Li , Yan Cong

People increasingly turn to large language models (LLMs) to interpret ambiguous social situations: a delayed text reply, an unusually cold supervisor, a teacher's mixed signals, or a boundary-crossing friend. Yet in many such cases, no…

Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Science 2026-04-28 Qiming Yuan , Linyi Han , Nam Ling , Cihan Ruan

Large language models have recently demonstrated remarkable abilities to self-correct their responses through iterative refinement, often referred to as self-consistency or self-reflection. However, the dynamics of this self-correction…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-11-13 Hossein A. Rahmani , Satyapriya Krishna , Xi Wang , Mohammadmehdi Naghiaei , Emine Yilmaz

In this paper, we explore the challenges inherent to Large Language Models (LLMs) like GPT-4, particularly their propensity for hallucinations, logic mistakes, and incorrect conclusions when tasked with answering complex questions. The…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-12-22 Xiang Li , Haoran Tang , Siyu Chen , Ziwei Wang , Anurag Maravi , Marcin Abram

Language models often misinterpret human intentions due to their handling of ambiguity, a limitation well-recognized in NLP research. While morally clear scenarios are more discernible to LLMs, greater difficulty is encountered in morally…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2024-10-11 Pranav Senthilkumar , Visshwa Balasubramanian , Prisha Jain , Aneesa Maity , Jonathan Lu , Kevin Zhu

Ambiguity in natural language is a significant obstacle for achieving accurate text to structured data mapping through large language models (LLMs), which affects the performance of tasks such as mapping text to agentic tool calling and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-02 Zhibo Hu , Chen Wang , Yanfeng Shu , Hye-Young Paik , Liming Zhu

In recent years, the development of large pretrained language models, such as BERT and GPT, significantly improved information extraction systems on various tasks, including relation classification. State-of-the-art systems are highly…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2023-08-07 Lars Klöser , Andre Büsgen , Philipp Kohl , Bodo Kraft , Albert Zündorf

While large language models (LLMs) excel in mathematical and code reasoning, we observe they struggle with social reasoning tasks, exhibiting cognitive confusion, logical inconsistencies, and conflation between objective world states and…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2025-10-14 Jialu Du , Guiyang Hou , Yihui Fu , Chen Wu , Wenqi Zhang , Yongliang Shen , Weiming Lu

One of the central aspects of contextualised language models is that they should be able to distinguish the meaning of lexically ambiguous words by their contexts. In this paper we investigate the extent to which the contextualised…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2021-09-30 Janosch Haber , Massimo Poesio

Natural language often contains ambiguities that can lead to misinterpretation and miscommunication. While humans can handle ambiguities effectively by asking clarifying questions and/or relying on contextual cues and common-sense…

Computation and Language · Computer Science 2022-11-24 Ninareh Mehrabi , Palash Goyal , Apurv Verma , Jwala Dhamala , Varun Kumar , Qian Hu , Kai-Wei Chang , Richard Zemel , Aram Galstyan , Rahul Gupta