How to Make the Most of LLMs' Grammatical Knowledge for Acceptability Judgments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Ide, Yusuke, Nishida, Yuto, Vasselli, Justin, Oba, Miyu, Sakai, Yusuke, Kamigaito, Hidetaka, Watanabe, Taro
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Ide, Yusuke
Nishida, Yuto
Vasselli, Justin
Oba, Miyu
Sakai, Yusuke
Kamigaito, Hidetaka
Watanabe, Taro
author_facet Ide, Yusuke
Nishida, Yuto
Vasselli, Justin
Oba, Miyu
Sakai, Yusuke
Kamigaito, Hidetaka
Watanabe, Taro
contents The grammatical knowledge of language models (LMs) is often measured using a benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs, where the LMs are presented with a pair of acceptable and unacceptable sentences and required to judge which is more acceptable. Conventional approaches directly compare sentence probabilities assigned by LMs, but recent large language models (LLMs) are trained to perform tasks via prompting, and thus, the raw probabilities they assign may not fully reflect their grammatical knowledge. In this study, we attempt to derive more accurate acceptability judgments from LLMs using prompts and templates. Through extensive experiments in English and Chinese, we compare nine judgment methods and find two of them, a probability readout method -- in-template LP and a prompt-based method -- Yes/No probability computing, achieve higher accuracy than the conventional ones. Our analysis reveals that these methods excel in different linguistic phenomena, suggesting they access different aspects of LLMs' knowledge. We also find that ensembling the two methods outperforms single methods. Consequently, we recommend these techniques, either individually or ensembled, as more effective alternatives to conventional approaches for assessing grammatical knowledge in LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_09639
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle How to Make the Most of LLMs' Grammatical Knowledge for Acceptability Judgments
Ide, Yusuke
Nishida, Yuto
Vasselli, Justin
Oba, Miyu
Sakai, Yusuke
Kamigaito, Hidetaka
Watanabe, Taro
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The grammatical knowledge of language models (LMs) is often measured using a benchmark of linguistic minimal pairs, where the LMs are presented with a pair of acceptable and unacceptable sentences and required to judge which is more acceptable. Conventional approaches directly compare sentence probabilities assigned by LMs, but recent large language models (LLMs) are trained to perform tasks via prompting, and thus, the raw probabilities they assign may not fully reflect their grammatical knowledge. In this study, we attempt to derive more accurate acceptability judgments from LLMs using prompts and templates. Through extensive experiments in English and Chinese, we compare nine judgment methods and find two of them, a probability readout method -- in-template LP and a prompt-based method -- Yes/No probability computing, achieve higher accuracy than the conventional ones. Our analysis reveals that these methods excel in different linguistic phenomena, suggesting they access different aspects of LLMs' knowledge. We also find that ensembling the two methods outperforms single methods. Consequently, we recommend these techniques, either individually or ensembled, as more effective alternatives to conventional approaches for assessing grammatical knowledge in LLMs.
title How to Make the Most of LLMs' Grammatical Knowledge for Acceptability Judgments
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.09639