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In order for AI systems to communicate effectively with people, they must understand how we make decisions. However, people's decisions are not always rational, so the implicit internal models of human decision-making in Large Language…

Do machines and humans process language in similar ways? Recent research has hinted at the affirmative, showing that human neural activity can be effectively predicted using the internal representations of language models (LMs). Although…

Pragmatics and non-literal language understanding are essential to human communication, and present a long-standing challenge for artificial language models. We perform a fine-grained comparison of language models and humans on seven…

The relationship between communicated language and intended meaning is often probabilistic and sensitive to context. Numerous strategies attempt to estimate such a mapping, often leveraging recursive Bayesian models of communication. In…

Formal logic enables computers to reason in natural language by representing sentences in symbolic forms and applying rules to derive conclusions. However, in what our study characterizes as "rulebreaker" scenarios, this method can lead to…

Large Language Models (LLMs) do not differentially represent numbers, which are pervasive in text. In contrast, neuroscience research has identified distinct neural representations for numbers and words. In this work, we investigate how…

Human language offers a powerful window into our thoughts -- we tell stories, give explanations, and express our beliefs and goals through words. Abundant evidence also suggests that language plays a developmental role in structuring our…

Can a machine understand the meanings of natural language? Recent developments in the generative large language models (LLMs) of artificial intelligence have led to the belief that traditional philosophical assumptions about machine…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit increasingly sophisticated linguistic capabilities, yet the extent to which these behaviors reflect human-like cognition versus advanced pattern recognition remains an open question. In this study, we…

Large language models (LLMs) are the result of a massive experiment in bottom-up, data-driven reverse engineering of language at scale. Despite their utility in a number of downstream NLP tasks, ample research has shown that LLMs are…

Whether large language models (LLMs) process language similarly to humans has been the subject of much theoretical and practical debate. We examine this question through the lens of the production-interpretation distinction found in human…

People acquire concepts through rich physical and social experiences and use them to understand and navigate the world. In contrast, large language models (LLMs), trained solely through next-token prediction on text, exhibit strikingly…

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at understanding natural language but struggle with explicit commonsense reasoning. A recent trend of research suggests that the combination of LLM with robust symbolic reasoning systems can overcome this…

The trade-off between expressiveness and interpretability remains a core challenge when building human-centric predictive models for classification and decision-making. While symbolic rules offer interpretability, they often lack…

The era of Large Language Models (LLMs) presents a new opportunity for interpretability--agentic interpretability: a multi-turn conversation with an LLM wherein the LLM proactively assists human understanding by developing and leveraging a…

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

Humans are believed to perceive numbers on a logarithmic mental number line, where smaller values are represented with greater resolution than larger ones. This cognitive bias, supported by neuroscience and behavioral studies, suggests that…

Over the past few years, the abilities of large language models (LLMs) have received extensive attention, which have performed exceptionally well in complicated scenarios such as logical reasoning and symbolic inference. A significant…

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…

Do large language models (LLMs) display rational reasoning? LLMs have been shown to contain human biases due to the data they have been trained on; whether this is reflected in rational reasoning remains less clear. In this paper, we answer…