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LLM-based social simulations can generate believable community interactions, enabling ``policy wind tunnels'' where governance interventions are tested before deployment. But believability is not causality. Claims like ``intervention $A$…

During a research project in which we developed a machine learning (ML) driven visualization system for non-ML experts, we reflected on interpretability research in ML, computer-supported collaborative work and human-computer interaction.…

Figurative and metaphorical language are commonplace in discourse, and figurative expressions play an important role in communication and cognition. However, figurative language has been a relatively under-studied area in NLP, and it…

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…

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) 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…

Despite advances in language modelling, distributional methods that build semantic representations from co-occurrences fail to discriminate between plausible and implausible events. In this work, we investigate how plausibility prediction…

Understanding the 3D world from 2D images involves more than detection and segmentation of the objects within the scene. It also includes the interpretation of the structure and arrangement of the scene elements. Such understanding is often…

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…

Language Models (LMs) have emerged as powerful sources of evidence for linguists seeking to develop theories of syntax. In this paper, we argue that causal interpretability methods, applied to LMs, can greatly enhance the value of such…

While the task of assessing the plausibility of events such as ''news is relevant'' has been addressed by a growing body of work, less attention has been paid to capturing changes in plausibility as triggered by event modification.…

Recent advances in language models have substantially improved Natural Language Understanding (NLU). Although widely used benchmarks suggest that Large Language Models (LLMs) can effectively disambiguate, their practical applicability in…

Interpretability research on large language models (LLMs) has yielded important insights into model behaviour, yet recurring pitfalls persist: findings that do not generalise, and causal interpretations that outrun the evidence. Our…

Lexical ambiguity -- where a single wordform takes on distinct, context-dependent meanings -- serves as a useful tool to compare across different language models' (LMs') ability to form distinct, contextualized representations of the same…

Causal reasoning is a core component of intelligence. Large language models (LLMs) have shown impressive capabilities in generating human-like text, raising questions about whether their responses reflect true understanding or statistical…

Large language models (LLMs) have demonstrated remarkable potential across a broad range of applications. However, producing reliable text that faithfully represents data remains a challenge. While prior work has shown that task-specific…

Large language models have exhibited impressive performance across a broad range of downstream tasks in natural language processing. However, how a language model predicts the next token and generates content is not generally understandable…

As large language models (LLMs) are increasing integrated into fact-checking pipelines, formal logic is often proposed as a rigorous means by which to mitigate bias, errors and hallucinations in these models' outputs. For example, some…

With the increasing interest in using large language models (LLMs) for planning in natural language, understanding their behaviors becomes an important research question. This work conducts a systematic investigation of LLMs' ability to…

Scientific feasibility assessment asks whether a claim is consistent with established knowledge and whether experimental evidence could support or refute it. We frame feasibility assessment as a diagnostic reasoning task in which, given a…