Cat, Rat, Meow: On the Alignment of Language Model and Human Term-Similarity Judgments

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Linhardt, Lorenz, Neuhäuser, Tom, Tětková, Lenka, Eberle, Oliver
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Linhardt, Lorenz
Neuhäuser, Tom
Tětková, Lenka
Eberle, Oliver
author_facet Linhardt, Lorenz
Neuhäuser, Tom
Tětková, Lenka
Eberle, Oliver
contents Small and mid-sized generative language models have gained increasing attention. Their size and availability make them amenable to being analyzed at a behavioral as well as a representational level, allowing investigations of how these levels interact. We evaluate 32 publicly available language models for their representational and behavioral alignment with human similarity judgments on a word triplet task. This provides a novel evaluation setting to probe semantic associations in language beyond common pairwise comparisons. We find that (1) even the representations of small language models can achieve human-level alignment, (2) instruction-tuned model variants can exhibit substantially increased agreement, (3) the pattern of alignment across layers is highly model dependent, and (4) alignment based on models' behavioral responses is highly dependent on model size, matching their representational alignment only for the largest evaluated models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2504_07965
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Cat, Rat, Meow: On the Alignment of Language Model and Human Term-Similarity Judgments
Linhardt, Lorenz
Neuhäuser, Tom
Tětková, Lenka
Eberle, Oliver
Machine Learning
Computation and Language
Small and mid-sized generative language models have gained increasing attention. Their size and availability make them amenable to being analyzed at a behavioral as well as a representational level, allowing investigations of how these levels interact. We evaluate 32 publicly available language models for their representational and behavioral alignment with human similarity judgments on a word triplet task. This provides a novel evaluation setting to probe semantic associations in language beyond common pairwise comparisons. We find that (1) even the representations of small language models can achieve human-level alignment, (2) instruction-tuned model variants can exhibit substantially increased agreement, (3) the pattern of alignment across layers is highly model dependent, and (4) alignment based on models' behavioral responses is highly dependent on model size, matching their representational alignment only for the largest evaluated models.
title Cat, Rat, Meow: On the Alignment of Language Model and Human Term-Similarity Judgments
topic Machine Learning
Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2504.07965