Related papers: Riddle Quest : The Enigma of Words

Question: I have five fingers but I am not alive. What am I? Answer: a glove. Answering such a riddle-style question is a challenging cognitive process, in that it requires complex commonsense reasoning abilities, an understanding of…

Given the emergent reasoning abilities of large language models, information retrieval is becoming more complex. Rather than just retrieve a document, modern information retrieval systems advertise that they can synthesize an answer based…

Users often ask dialogue systems ambiguous questions that require clarification. We show that current language models rarely ask users to clarify ambiguous questions and instead provide incorrect answers. To address this, we introduce CLAM:…

Large language models (LLMs) such as GPT, Gemini, and Claude often appear adept at solving classic logic puzzles--but how much genuine reasoning underlies their answers? Recent evidence suggests that these models frequently rely on…

Probabilistic puzzles can be confusing, partly because they are formulated in natural languages - full of unclarities and ambiguities - and partly because there is no widely accepted and intuitive formal language to express them. We propose…

Paraphrasing methods recognize, generate, or extract phrases, sentences, or longer natural language expressions that convey almost the same information. Textual entailment methods, on the other hand, recognize, generate, or extract pairs of…

Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong semantic understanding, yet struggle when user instructions involve ambiguous or conceptually misaligned terms. We propose the Language Graph Model (LGM) to enhance conceptual clarity by…

This study utilizes the game Codenames as a benchmarking tool to evaluate large language models (LLMs) with respect to specific linguistic and cognitive skills. LLMs play each side of the game, where one side generates a clue word covering…

Commonsense knowledge is essential for machines to reason about the world. Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated their ability to perform almost human-like text generation. Despite this success, they fall short as trustworthy…

Prompted models have demonstrated impressive few-shot learning abilities. Repeated interactions at test-time with a single model, or the composition of multiple models together, further expands capabilities. These compositions are…

Inductive reasoning is an essential capability for large language models (LLMs) to achieve higher intelligence, which requires the model to generalize rules from observed facts and then apply them to unseen examples. We present MIRAGE, a…

Any act of problem-solving combines prior knowledge, local search, and a third element that is less often discussed: the extraction of information from search to update understanding. I propose a model of mathematical problem-solving as a…

We consider the problem of finding plausible knowledge that is missing from a given ontology, as a generalisation of the well-studied taxonomy expansion task. One line of work treats this task as a Natural Language Inference (NLI) problem,…

Cross-lingual representations of words enable us to reason about word meaning in multilingual contexts and are a key facilitator of cross-lingual transfer when developing natural language processing models for low-resource languages. In…

Metaphors are everywhere. They appear extensively across all domains of natural language, from the most sophisticated poetry to seemingly dry academic prose. A significant body of research in the cognitive science of language argues for the…

Ambiguity is an intrinsic feature of natural language. Managing ambiguity is a key part of human language understanding, allowing us to anticipate misunderstanding as communicators and revise our interpretations as listeners. As language…

Visual metaphors are powerful rhetorical devices used to persuade or communicate creative ideas through images. Similar to linguistic metaphors, they convey meaning implicitly through symbolism and juxtaposition of the symbols. We propose a…

Idioms pose a fundamental challenge for language models, as their meaning cannot be inferred from surface form alone. Understanding such expressions, therefore, requires semantic abstraction beyond lexical overlap. We introduce IdioLink, a…

Language models can be prompted to perform a wide variety of zero- and few-shot learning problems. However, performance varies significantly with the choice of prompt, and we do not yet understand why this happens or how to pick the best…

This paper proposes a simple test for compositionality (i.e., literal usage) of a word or phrase in a context-specific way. The test is computationally simple, relying on no external resources and only uses a set of trained word vectors.…