Animate, or Inanimate, That is the Question for Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Ranaldi, Leonardo, Pucci, Giulia, Zanzotto, Fabio Massimo
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866929456281550848
author Ranaldi, Leonardo
Pucci, Giulia
Zanzotto, Fabio Massimo
author_facet Ranaldi, Leonardo
Pucci, Giulia
Zanzotto, Fabio Massimo
contents The cognitive essence of humans is deeply intertwined with the concept of animacy, which plays an essential role in shaping their memory, vision, and multi-layered language understanding. Although animacy appears in language via nuanced constraints on verbs and adjectives, it is also learned and refined through extralinguistic information. Similarly, we assume that the LLMs' limited abilities to understand natural language when processing animacy are motivated by the fact that these models are trained exclusively on text. Hence, the question this paper aims to answer arises: can LLMs, in their digital wisdom, process animacy in a similar way to what humans would do? We then propose a systematic analysis via prompting approaches. In particular, we probe different LLMs by prompting them using animate, inanimate, usual, and stranger contexts. Results reveal that, although LLMs have been trained predominantly on textual data, they exhibit human-like behavior when faced with typical animate and inanimate entities in alignment with earlier studies. Hence, LLMs can adapt to understand unconventional situations by recognizing oddities as animated without needing to interface with unspoken cognitive triggers humans rely on to break down animations.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_06332
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Animate, or Inanimate, That is the Question for Large Language Models
Ranaldi, Leonardo
Pucci, Giulia
Zanzotto, Fabio Massimo
Computation and Language
The cognitive essence of humans is deeply intertwined with the concept of animacy, which plays an essential role in shaping their memory, vision, and multi-layered language understanding. Although animacy appears in language via nuanced constraints on verbs and adjectives, it is also learned and refined through extralinguistic information. Similarly, we assume that the LLMs' limited abilities to understand natural language when processing animacy are motivated by the fact that these models are trained exclusively on text. Hence, the question this paper aims to answer arises: can LLMs, in their digital wisdom, process animacy in a similar way to what humans would do? We then propose a systematic analysis via prompting approaches. In particular, we probe different LLMs by prompting them using animate, inanimate, usual, and stranger contexts. Results reveal that, although LLMs have been trained predominantly on textual data, they exhibit human-like behavior when faced with typical animate and inanimate entities in alignment with earlier studies. Hence, LLMs can adapt to understand unconventional situations by recognizing oddities as animated without needing to interface with unspoken cognitive triggers humans rely on to break down animations.
title Animate, or Inanimate, That is the Question for Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.06332