Related papers: Surprisal from Larger Transformer-based Language M…

The impressive linguistic abilities of large language models (LLMs) have recommended them as models of human sentence processing, with some conjecturing a positive 'quality-power' relationship (Wilcox et al., 2023), in which language…

Recent studies have shown that as Transformer-based language models become larger and are trained on very large amounts of data, the fit of their surprisal estimates to naturalistic human reading times degrades. The current work presents a…

A wide body of evidence shows that human language processing difficulty is predicted by the information-theoretic measure surprisal, a word's negative log probability in context. However, it is still unclear how to best estimate these…

This work presents a detailed linguistic analysis into why larger Transformer-based pre-trained language models with more parameters and lower perplexity nonetheless yield surprisal estimates that are less predictive of human reading times.…

Recent psycholinguistic studies have drawn conflicting conclusions about the relationship between the quality of a language model and the ability of its surprisal estimates to predict human reading times, which has been speculated to be due…

In psycholinguistic modeling, surprisal from larger pre-trained language models has been shown to be a poorer predictor of naturalistic human reading times. However, it has been speculated that this may be due to data leakage that caused…

To date, most investigations on surprisal and entropy effects in reading have been conducted on the group level, disregarding individual differences. In this work, we revisit the predictive power of surprisal and entropy measures estimated…

Work on scaling laws has found that large language models (LMs) show predictable improvements to overall loss with increased scale (model size, training data, and compute). Here, we present evidence for the claim that LMs may show inverse…

Over the past decade, studies of naturalistic language processing where participants are scanned while listening to continuous text have flourished. Using word embeddings at first, then large language models, researchers have created…

This paper investigates the use of word surprisal, a measure of the predictability of a word in a given context, as a feature to aid speech synthesis prosody. We explore how word surprisal extracted from large language models (LLMs)…

Recent cognitive modeling studies have reported that larger language models (LMs) exhibit a poorer fit to human reading behavior (Oh and Schuler, 2023b; Shain et al., 2024; Kuribayashi et al., 2024), leading to claims of their cognitive…

Transformers underlie almost all state-of-the-art language models in computational linguistics, yet their cognitive adequacy as models of human sentence processing remains disputed. In this work, we use a surprisal-based linking mechanism…

When we read, we make predictions about upcoming words; these predictions influence our reading behavior. The success of large language models (LLMs), which, like humans, make predictions about upcoming words, has motivated their use as…

State-of-the-art neural language models (LMs) represented by Transformers are highly complex. Their use of fixed, deterministic parameter estimates fail to account for model uncertainty and lead to over-fitting and poor generalization when…

Transformer-based language models (LMs) continue to advance state-of-the-art performance on NLP benchmark tasks, including tasks designed to mimic human-inspired "commonsense" competencies. To better understand the degree to which LMs can…

We analyze if large language models are able to predict patterns of human reading behavior. We compare the performance of language-specific and multilingual pretrained transformer models to predict reading time measures reflecting natural…

Humans are accustomed to reading and writing in a forward manner, and this natural bias extends to text understanding in auto-regressive large language models (LLMs). This paper investigates whether LLMs, like humans, struggle with reverse…

Transformer-based language models (LMs) continue to achieve state-of-the-art performance on natural language processing (NLP) benchmarks, including tasks designed to mimic human-inspired "commonsense" competencies. To better understand the…

How predictable a word is can be quantified in two ways: using human responses to the cloze task or using probabilities from language models (LMs).When used as predictors of processing effort, LM probabilities outperform probabilities…

Instruction tuning aligns the response of large language models (LLMs) with human preferences. Despite such efforts in human--LLM alignment, we find that instruction tuning does not always make LLMs human-like from a cognitive modeling…