PhonologyBench: Evaluating Phonological Skills of Large Language Models

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Hauptverfasser: Suvarna, Ashima, Khandelwal, Harshita, Peng, Nanyun
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2024
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author Suvarna, Ashima
Khandelwal, Harshita
Peng, Nanyun
author_facet Suvarna, Ashima
Khandelwal, Harshita
Peng, Nanyun
contents Phonology, the study of speech's structure and pronunciation rules, is a critical yet often overlooked component in Large Language Model (LLM) research. LLMs are widely used in various downstream applications that leverage phonology such as educational tools and poetry generation. Moreover, LLMs can potentially learn imperfect associations between orthographic and phonological forms from the training data. Thus, it is imperative to benchmark the phonological skills of LLMs. To this end, we present PhonologyBench, a novel benchmark consisting of three diagnostic tasks designed to explicitly test the phonological skills of LLMs in English: grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, syllable counting, and rhyme word generation. Despite having no access to speech data, LLMs showcased notable performance on the PhonologyBench tasks. However, we observe a significant gap of 17% and 45% on Rhyme Word Generation and Syllable counting, respectively, when compared to humans. Our findings underscore the importance of studying LLM performance on phonological tasks that inadvertently impact real-world applications. Furthermore, we encourage researchers to choose LLMs that perform well on the phonological task that is closely related to the downstream application since we find that no single model consistently outperforms the others on all the tasks.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2404_02456
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle PhonologyBench: Evaluating Phonological Skills of Large Language Models
Suvarna, Ashima
Khandelwal, Harshita
Peng, Nanyun
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
Phonology, the study of speech's structure and pronunciation rules, is a critical yet often overlooked component in Large Language Model (LLM) research. LLMs are widely used in various downstream applications that leverage phonology such as educational tools and poetry generation. Moreover, LLMs can potentially learn imperfect associations between orthographic and phonological forms from the training data. Thus, it is imperative to benchmark the phonological skills of LLMs. To this end, we present PhonologyBench, a novel benchmark consisting of three diagnostic tasks designed to explicitly test the phonological skills of LLMs in English: grapheme-to-phoneme conversion, syllable counting, and rhyme word generation. Despite having no access to speech data, LLMs showcased notable performance on the PhonologyBench tasks. However, we observe a significant gap of 17% and 45% on Rhyme Word Generation and Syllable counting, respectively, when compared to humans. Our findings underscore the importance of studying LLM performance on phonological tasks that inadvertently impact real-world applications. Furthermore, we encourage researchers to choose LLMs that perform well on the phonological task that is closely related to the downstream application since we find that no single model consistently outperforms the others on all the tasks.
title PhonologyBench: Evaluating Phonological Skills of Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Sound
Audio and Speech Processing
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2404.02456