Related papers: Pragmatic Theories Enhance Understanding of Implie…

Pragmatics, the ability to infer meaning beyond literal interpretation, is crucial for social cognition and communication. While LLMs have been benchmarked for their pragmatic understanding, improving their performance remains…

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…

People rely heavily on context to enrich meaning beyond what is literally said, enabling concise but effective communication. To interact successfully and naturally with people, user-facing artificial intelligence systems will require…

Large language models (LLMs) have achieved remarkable performance in generating human-like text and solving reasoning tasks of moderate complexity, such as question-answering and mathematical problem-solving. However, their capabilities in…

Presupposition projection in conditionals is central to theories of meaning and pragmatics, yet it remains largely unevaluated in large language models. We address this gap through a parallel behavioral study comparing human judgments and…

Large language models (LLMs) increasingly exhibit human-like patterns of pragmatic and social reasoning. This paper addresses two related questions: do LLMs approximate human social meaning not only qualitatively but also quantitatively,…

Current large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated emerging capabilities in social intelligence tasks, including implicature resolution and theory-of-mind reasoning, both of which require substantial pragmatic understanding. However,…

We show that explicit pragmatic inference aids in correctly generating and following natural language instructions for complex, sequential tasks. Our pragmatics-enabled models reason about why speakers produce certain instructions, and…

Recent advances in Bayesian probability theory and its application to cognitive science in combination with the development of a new generation of computational tools and methods for probabilistic computation have led to a 'probabilistic…

Probabilistic models of language understanding are valuable tools for investigating human language use. However, they need to be hand-designed for a particular domain. In contrast, large language models (LLMs) are trained on text that spans…

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…

Despite widespread use of LLMs as conversational agents, evaluations of performance fail to capture a crucial aspect of communication: interpreting language in context -- incorporating its pragmatics. Humans interpret language using beliefs…

We propose misogyny detection as an Argumentative Reasoning task and we investigate the capacity of large language models (LLMs) to understand the implicit reasoning used to convey misogyny in both Italian and English. The central aim is to…

We present a model of pragmatic referring expression interpretation in a grounded communication task (identifying colors from descriptions) that draws upon predictions from two recurrent neural network classifiers, a speaker and a listener,…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated strong performance in a wide-range of language tasks without requiring task-specific fine-tuning. However, they remain prone to hallucinations and inconsistencies, and often struggle with…

Inductive reasoning is a core problem-solving capacity: humans can identify underlying principles from a few examples, which robustly generalize to novel scenarios. Recent work evaluates large language models (LLMs) on inductive reasoning…

Recently, a boom of papers has shown extraordinary progress in zero-shot and few-shot learning with various prompt-based models. It is commonly argued that prompts help models to learn faster in the same way that humans learn faster when…

Computational models of pragmatic language use have traditionally relied on hand-specified sets of utterances and meanings, limiting their applicability to real-world language use. We propose a neuro-symbolic framework that enhances…

Prompt engineering has emerged as an indispensable technique for extending the capabilities of large language models (LLMs) and vision-language models (VLMs). This approach leverages task-specific instructions, known as prompts, to enhance…

This paper explores the impact of variable pragmatic competence on communicative success through simulating language learning and conversing between speakers and listeners with different levels of reasoning abilities. Through studying this…