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Given a specific discourse, which discourse properties trigger the use of metaphorical language, rather than using literal alternatives? For example, what drives people to say "grasp the meaning" rather than "understand the meaning" within…

To understand narrative, humans draw inferences about the underlying relations between narrative events. Cognitive theories of narrative understanding define these inferences as four different types of causality, that include pairs of…

Language models (LMs) trained on large quantities of text have been claimed to acquire abstract linguistic representations. Our work tests the robustness of these abstractions by focusing on the ability of LMs to learn interactions between…

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

This papers develops a logical language for representing probabilistic causal laws. Our interest in such a language is twofold. First, it can be motivated as a fundamental study of the representation of causal knowledge. Causality has an…

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…

Lexical ambiguity presents a profound and enduring challenge to the language sciences. Researchers for decades have grappled with the problem of how language users learn, represent and process words with more than one meaning. Our work…

We present a novel approach to classify causal micro-narratives from text. These narratives are sentence-level explanations of the cause(s) and/or effect(s) of a target subject. The approach requires only a subject-specific ontology of…

Lexical semantics theories differ in advocating that the meaning of words is represented as an inference graph, a feature mapping or a vector space, thus raising the question: is it the case that one of these approaches is superior to the…

LLMs can be unpredictable, as even slight alterations to the prompt can cause the output to change in unexpected ways. Thus, the ability of models to accurately explain their behavior is critical, especially in high-stakes settings. One…

We introduce semantic-features, an extensible, easy-to-use library based on Chronis et al. (2023) for studying contextualized word embeddings of LMs by projecting them into interpretable spaces. We apply this tool in an experiment where we…

This paper presents a systematic defense of large language model (LLM) hallucinations or 'confabulations' as a potential resource instead of a categorically negative pitfall. The standard view is that confabulations are inherently…

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automatic judges for summarization and dialogue evaluation. Prior work has documented biases such as position, verbosity, and style preferences, but largely focuses on outcomes, leaving…

Context, as referred to situational factors related to the object of interest, can help infer the object's states or properties in visual recognition. As such contextual features are too diverse (across instances) to be annotated, existing…

Subjective language understanding refers to a broad set of natural language processing tasks where the goal is to interpret or generate content that conveys personal feelings, opinions, or figurative meanings rather than objective facts.…

Despite the advanced capabilities of large language models (LLMs), their temporal reasoning ability remains underdeveloped. Prior works have highlighted this limitation, particularly in maintaining temporal consistency when understanding…

Large language models (LLMs) can recall a wide range of factual knowledge across languages. However, existing factual recall evaluations primarily assess fact retrieval in isolation, where the queried entity is explicitly named and the fact…

Suspense is an affective response to narrative text that is believed to involve complex cognitive processes in humans. Several psychological models have been developed to describe this phenomenon and the circumstances under which text might…

Recent work by Chatzi et al. and Ravfogel et al. has developed, for the first time, a method for generating counterfactuals of probabilistic Large Language Models. Such counterfactuals tell us what would - or might - have been the output of…

Instruction-tuned LLMs are able to provide \textit{an} explanation about their output to users by generating self-explanations, without requiring the application of complex interpretability techniques. In this paper, we analyse whether this…