Related papers: DRInQ: Evaluating Conversational Implicature with …
Language models are often used as the backbone of modern dialogue systems. These models are pre-trained on large amounts of written fluent language. Repetition is typically penalised when evaluating language model generations. However, it…
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…
Pragmatic reasoning, inferring intended meaning beyond literal semantics, underpins everyday communication yet remains difficult for large language models. We present the Contextual Emotional Inference (CEI) Benchmark: 300 human-validated…
Conversational grounding is a collaborative mechanism for establishing mutual knowledge among participants engaged in a dialogue. This experimental study analyzes information-seeking conversations to investigate the capabilities of large…
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…
Recent Iterated Response (IR) models of pragmatics conceptualize language use as a recursive process in which agents reason about each other to increase communicative efficiency. These models are generally defined over complete utterances.…
Despite the increasing effectiveness of language models, their reasoning capabilities remain underdeveloped. In particular, causal reasoning through counterfactual question answering is lacking. This work aims to bridge this gap. We first…
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…
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…
Large language models (LLMs) excel at solving problems with clear and complete statements, but often struggle with nuanced environments or interactive tasks which are common in most real-world scenarios. This highlights the critical need…
Human dialogues are scenario-based and appropriate responses generally relate to the latent context knowledge entailed by the specific scenario. To enable responses that are more meaningful and context-specific, we propose to improve…
This study investigates the reasoning robustness of large language models (LLMs) on mathematical problem-solving tasks under systematically introduced input perturbations. Using the GSM8K dataset as a controlled testbed, we evaluate how…
The rapid advancement of Large Language Models (LLMs) is positioning language at the core of human-computer interaction (HCI). We argue that advancing HCI requires attention to the linguistic foundations of interaction, particularly…
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…
Human communication is based on a variety of inferences that we draw from sentences, often going beyond what is literally said. While there is wide agreement on the basic distinction between entailment, implicature, and presupposition, the…
Pragmatic reasoning plays a pivotal role in deciphering implicit meanings that frequently arise in real-life conversations and is essential for the development of communicative social agents. In this paper, we introduce a novel challenge,…
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…
We propose a large language model explainability technique for obtaining faithful natural language explanations by grounding the explanations in a reasoning process. When converted to a sequence of tokens, the outputs of the reasoning…
We present a model for pragmatically describing scenes, in which contrastive behavior results from a combination of inference-driven pragmatics and learned semantics. Like previous learned approaches to language generation, our model uses a…
Conceptual reasoning, the ability to reason in abstract and high-level perspectives, is key to generalization in human cognition. However, limited study has been done on large language models' capability to perform conceptual reasoning. In…