Related papers: The Frequency Confound in Language-Model Surprisal…
Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of…
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)…
By positing a relationship between naturalistic reading times and information-theoretic surprisal, surprisal theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008) provides a natural interface between language models and psycholinguistic models. This paper…
We present a new perspective on how readers integrate context during real-time language comprehension. Our proposals build on surprisal theory, which posits that the processing effort of a linguistic unit (e.g., a word) is an affine…
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…
Surprisal theory posits that the processing difficulty of a word is determined by its predictability in context, offering a potential link between human sentence processing and next-word predictions from language models. While language…
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…
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…
There has been considerable interest in using surprisal from Transformer-based language models (LMs) as predictors of human sentence processing difficulty. Recent work has observed an inverse scaling relationship between Transformers'…
A fundamental result in psycholinguistics is that less predictable words take a longer time to process. One theoretical explanation for this finding is Surprisal Theory (Hale, 2001; Levy, 2008), which quantifies a word's predictability as…
Transformer language models have shown remarkable ability in detecting when a word is anomalous in context, but likelihood scores offer no information about the cause of the anomaly. In this work, we use Gaussian models for density…
Much of the success of modern language models depends on finding a suitable prompt to instruct the model. Until now, it has been largely unknown how variations in the linguistic expression of prompts affect these models. This study…
Prompt sensitivity, referring to the phenomenon where paraphrasing (i.e., repeating something written or spoken using different words) leads to significant changes in large language model (LLM) performance, has been widely accepted as 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…
Large language Models (LLMs) are highly sensitive to variations in prompt formulation, which can significantly impact their ability to generate accurate responses. In this paper, we introduce a new task, Prompt Sensitivity Prediction, and a…
Language Confusion is a phenomenon where Large Language Models (LLMs) generate text that is neither in the desired language, nor in a contextually appropriate language. This phenomenon presents a critical challenge in text generation by…
Surprisal theory posits that the cognitive effort required to comprehend a word is determined by its contextual predictability, quantified as surprisal. Traditionally, surprisal theory treats words as distinct entities, overlooking any…
Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used as powerful tools for several high-stakes natural language processing (NLP) applications. Recent prompting works claim to elicit intermediate reasoning steps and key tokens that serve as…
When comparing the linguistic capabilities of language models (LMs) with humans using LM probabilities, factors such as the length of the sequence and the unigram frequency of lexical items have a significant effect on LM probabilities in…
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…