Understand the Implication: Learning to Think for Pragmatic Understanding

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Sravanthi, Settaluri Lakshmi, Maharaj, Kishan, Gunnu, Sravani, Mishra, Abhijit, Bhattacharyya, Pushpak
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
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author Sravanthi, Settaluri Lakshmi
Maharaj, Kishan
Gunnu, Sravani
Mishra, Abhijit
Bhattacharyya, Pushpak
author_facet Sravanthi, Settaluri Lakshmi
Maharaj, Kishan
Gunnu, Sravani
Mishra, Abhijit
Bhattacharyya, Pushpak
contents Pragmatics, the ability to infer meaning beyond literal interpretation, is crucial for social cognition and communication. While LLMs have been benchmarked for their pragmatic understanding, improving their performance remains underexplored. Existing methods rely on annotated labels but overlook the reasoning process humans naturally use to interpret implicit meaning. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel pragmatic dataset, ImpliedMeaningPreference, that includes explicit reasoning (thoughts) for both correct and incorrect interpretations. Through preference-tuning and supervised fine-tuning, we demonstrate that thought-based learning significantly enhances LLMs' pragmatic understanding, improving accuracy by 11.12% across model families. We further discuss a transfer-learning study where we evaluate the performance of thought-based training for the other tasks of pragmatics (presupposition, deixis) that are not seen during the training time and observe an improvement of 16.10% compared to label-trained models.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2506_13559
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Understand the Implication: Learning to Think for Pragmatic Understanding
Sravanthi, Settaluri Lakshmi
Maharaj, Kishan
Gunnu, Sravani
Mishra, Abhijit
Bhattacharyya, Pushpak
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Pragmatics, the ability to infer meaning beyond literal interpretation, is crucial for social cognition and communication. While LLMs have been benchmarked for their pragmatic understanding, improving their performance remains underexplored. Existing methods rely on annotated labels but overlook the reasoning process humans naturally use to interpret implicit meaning. To bridge this gap, we introduce a novel pragmatic dataset, ImpliedMeaningPreference, that includes explicit reasoning (thoughts) for both correct and incorrect interpretations. Through preference-tuning and supervised fine-tuning, we demonstrate that thought-based learning significantly enhances LLMs' pragmatic understanding, improving accuracy by 11.12% across model families. We further discuss a transfer-learning study where we evaluate the performance of thought-based training for the other tasks of pragmatics (presupposition, deixis) that are not seen during the training time and observe an improvement of 16.10% compared to label-trained models.
title Understand the Implication: Learning to Think for Pragmatic Understanding
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.13559