Probing Quantifier Comprehension in Large Language Models: Another Example of Inverse Scaling
With their increasing size, large language models (LLMs) are becoming increasingly good at language understanding tasks. But even with high performance on specific downstream task, LLMs fail at simple linguistic tests for negation or quantifier understanding. Previous work on quantifier understanding in LLMs show inverse scaling in understanding few-type quantifiers. In this paper, we question the claims of of previous work and show that it is a result of inappropriate testing methodology. We also present alternate methods to measure quantifier comprehension in LLMs and show that LLMs are able to better understand the difference between the meaning of few-type and most-type quantifiers as their size increases, although they are not particularly good at it. We also observe inverse scaling for most-type quantifier understanding, which is contrary to human psycho-linguistic experiments and previous work, where the model's understanding of most-type quantifier gets worse as the model size increases. We do this evaluation on models ranging from 125M-175B parameters, which suggests that LLMs do not do as well as expected with quantifiers. We also discuss the possible reasons for this and the relevance of quantifier understanding in evaluating language understanding in LLMs.
Code (0)
등록된 구현이 없습니다.
Tasks
NegationMethods 이 논문이 사용한 방법론
Similar Papers 제목 키워드 기반
Generalized Quantifiers as a Source of Error in Multilingual NLU Benchmarks
Logical approaches to representing language have developed and evaluated computational models of quantifier words since the 19th century, but today's NLU models still struggle to capture their semantics. We rely on Gener…
Generalized Quantifiers as a Source of Error in Multilingual NLU Benchmarks
Logical approaches to representing language have developed and evaluated computational models of quantifier words since the 19th century, but today's NLU models still struggle to capture their semantics. We rely on Gener…
Pragmatic Reasoning Unlocks Quantifier Semantics for Foundation Models
Generalized quantifiers (e.g., few, most) are used to indicate the proportions predicates are satisfied (for example, some apples are red). One way to interpret quantifier semantics is to explicitly bind these satisfacti…
Natural Language InferenceProbing What Different NLP Tasks Teach Machines about Function Word Comprehension
We introduce a set of nine challenge tasks that test for the understanding of function words. These tasks are created by structurally mutating sentences from existing datasets to target the comprehension of specific type…
CCG SupertaggingLanguage ModelingLanguage ModellingNatural Language Inference+2Rarely a problem? Language models exhibit inverse scaling in their predictions following few-type quantifiers
How well do language models deal with quantification? In this study, we focus on 'few'-type quantifiers, as in 'few children like toys', which might pose a particular challenge for language models because the sentence co…
SentenceVocal Bursts Type Prediction