Why Do LLMs Accept Generics? Explaining Acceptability using Psycholinguistic and Model-Derived Factors

Key points

• People consider several other factors such as how well it sets the kind apart from others or whether it is characteristic of the kind.1
• Inspired by the linguistic and cognitive literature, we explore to what extent factors from these studies explain how large language models (LLMs) judge generics.1
• Our results with twelve models on a psycholinguistic dataset and on naturally occurring generics show that models weigh how common a property is against how well it distinguishes the kind, and combine the two much as people do, though less clearly.1
• What matters most to LLMs is whether a statement is factually true, and much of the influence of human factors reaches their ratings through that judgment.1

Sources (1)

• [1]Why Do LLMs Accept Generics? Explaining Acceptability using Psycholinguistic and Model-Derived Factors
  arXiv (AI, ML, NLP, CV, robotics, multi-agent) · Oct 20, 09:40 AM

  Psycholinguistic studies explore why humans accept some generic statements but reject others by showing that these judgments depend on more than how common a property is.

  People consider several other factors such as how well it sets the kind apart from others or whether it is characteristic of the kind.

Extractive summary: sentences quoted from the sources.