Saved in:
| Main Authors: | , , |
|---|---|
| Format: | Preprint |
| Published: |
2025
|
| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00030 |
| Tags: |
Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
|
| _version_ | 1866908344231395328 |
|---|---|
| author | Underwood, Ted Nelson, Laura K. Wilkens, Matthew |
| author_facet | Underwood, Ted Nelson, Laura K. Wilkens, Matthew |
| contents | Before researchers can use language models to simulate the past, they need to understand the risk of anachronism. We find that prompting a contemporary model with examples of period prose does not produce output consistent with period style. Fine-tuning produces results that are stylistically convincing enough to fool an automated judge, but human evaluators can still distinguish fine-tuned model outputs from authentic historical text. We tentatively conclude that pretraining on period prose may be required in order to reliably simulate historical perspectives for social research. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_00030 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Can Language Models Represent the Past without Anachronism? Underwood, Ted Nelson, Laura K. Wilkens, Matthew Computation and Language Before researchers can use language models to simulate the past, they need to understand the risk of anachronism. We find that prompting a contemporary model with examples of period prose does not produce output consistent with period style. Fine-tuning produces results that are stylistically convincing enough to fool an automated judge, but human evaluators can still distinguish fine-tuned model outputs from authentic historical text. We tentatively conclude that pretraining on period prose may be required in order to reliably simulate historical perspectives for social research. |
| title | Can Language Models Represent the Past without Anachronism? |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.00030 |