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Main Authors: Golub, Anna, Zywietz, Beate, Eichel, Annerose
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21828
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author Golub, Anna
Zywietz, Beate
Eichel, Annerose
author_facet Golub, Anna
Zywietz, Beate
Eichel, Annerose
contents While the task of assessing the plausibility of events such as ''news is relevant'' has been addressed by a growing body of work, less attention has been paid to capturing changes in plausibility as triggered by event modification. Understanding changes in plausibility is relevant for tasks such as dialogue generation, commonsense reasoning, and hallucination detection as it allows to correctly model, for example, ''gentle sarcasm'' as a sign of closeness rather than unkindness among friends [9]. In this work, we tackle the ADEPT challenge benchmark [6] consisting of 16K English sentence pairs differing by exactly one adjectival modifier. Our modeling experiments provide a conceptually novel method by using sentence transformers, and reveal that both they and transformer-based models struggle with the task at hand, and sentence transformers - despite their conceptual alignment with the task - even under-perform in comparison to models like RoBERTa. Furthermore, an in-depth comparison with prior work highlights the importance of a more realistic, balanced evaluation method: imbalances distort model performance and evaluation metrics, and weaken result trustworthiness.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2507_21828
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modelling Adjectival Modification Effects on Semantic Plausibility
Golub, Anna
Zywietz, Beate
Eichel, Annerose
Computation and Language
While the task of assessing the plausibility of events such as ''news is relevant'' has been addressed by a growing body of work, less attention has been paid to capturing changes in plausibility as triggered by event modification. Understanding changes in plausibility is relevant for tasks such as dialogue generation, commonsense reasoning, and hallucination detection as it allows to correctly model, for example, ''gentle sarcasm'' as a sign of closeness rather than unkindness among friends [9]. In this work, we tackle the ADEPT challenge benchmark [6] consisting of 16K English sentence pairs differing by exactly one adjectival modifier. Our modeling experiments provide a conceptually novel method by using sentence transformers, and reveal that both they and transformer-based models struggle with the task at hand, and sentence transformers - despite their conceptual alignment with the task - even under-perform in comparison to models like RoBERTa. Furthermore, an in-depth comparison with prior work highlights the importance of a more realistic, balanced evaluation method: imbalances distort model performance and evaluation metrics, and weaken result trustworthiness.
title Modelling Adjectival Modification Effects on Semantic Plausibility
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2507.21828