Perceptions of Linguistic Uncertainty by Language Models and Humans
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| Main Authors: | , , , , |
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2024
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| _version_ | 1866910687520882688 |
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| author | Belem, Catarina G Kelly, Markelle Steyvers, Mark Singh, Sameer Smyth, Padhraic |
| author_facet | Belem, Catarina G Kelly, Markelle Steyvers, Mark Singh, Sameer Smyth, Padhraic |
| contents | _Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions, there has been little inquiry into the abilities of language models in the same context. In this paper, we investigate how language models map linguistic expressions of uncertainty to numerical responses. Our approach assesses whether language models can employ theory of mind in this setting: understanding the uncertainty of another agent about a particular statement, independently of the model's own certainty about that statement. We find that 7 out of 10 models are able to map uncertainty expressions to probabilistic responses in a human-like manner. However, we observe systematically different behavior depending on whether a statement is actually true or false. This sensitivity indicates that language models are substantially more susceptible to bias based on their prior knowledge (as compared to humans). These findings raise important questions and have broad implications for human-AI and AI-AI communication. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_15814 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2024 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Perceptions of Linguistic Uncertainty by Language Models and Humans Belem, Catarina G Kelly, Markelle Steyvers, Mark Singh, Sameer Smyth, Padhraic Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning _Uncertainty expressions_ such as "probably" or "highly unlikely" are pervasive in human language. While prior work has established that there is population-level agreement in terms of how humans quantitatively interpret these expressions, there has been little inquiry into the abilities of language models in the same context. In this paper, we investigate how language models map linguistic expressions of uncertainty to numerical responses. Our approach assesses whether language models can employ theory of mind in this setting: understanding the uncertainty of another agent about a particular statement, independently of the model's own certainty about that statement. We find that 7 out of 10 models are able to map uncertainty expressions to probabilistic responses in a human-like manner. However, we observe systematically different behavior depending on whether a statement is actually true or false. This sensitivity indicates that language models are substantially more susceptible to bias based on their prior knowledge (as compared to humans). These findings raise important questions and have broad implications for human-AI and AI-AI communication. |
| title | Perceptions of Linguistic Uncertainty by Language Models and Humans |
| topic | Computation and Language Artificial Intelligence Machine Learning |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.15814 |