Counting the Bugs in ChatGPT’s Wugs: A Multilingual Investigation into the Morphological Capabilities of a Large Language Model

Leonie Weissweiler, Valentin Hofmann, Anjali Kantharuban, Anna Cai, Ritam Dutt, Amey Hengle, Anubha Kabra, Atharva Kulkarni, Abhishek Vijayakumar, Haofei Yu, Hinrich Schuetze, Kemal Oflazer, David Mortensen


Abstract
Large language models (LLMs) have recently reached an impressive level of linguistic capability, prompting comparisons with human language skills. However, there have been relatively few systematic inquiries into the linguistic capabilities of the latest generation of LLMs, and those studies that do exist (i) ignore the remarkable ability of humans to generalize, (ii) focus only on English, and (iii) investigate syntax or semantics and overlook other capabilities that lie at the heart of human language, like morphology. Here, we close these gaps by conducting the first rigorous analysis of the morphological capabilities of ChatGPT in four typologically varied languages (specifically, English, German, Tamil, and Turkish). We apply a version of Berko’s (1958) wug test to ChatGPT, using novel, uncontaminated datasets for the four examined languages. We find that ChatGPT massively underperforms purpose-built systems, particularly in English. Overall, our results—through the lens of morphology—cast a new light on the linguistic capabilities of ChatGPT, suggesting that claims of human-like language skills are premature and misleading.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.401
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
6508–6524
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.401
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.401
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leonie Weissweiler, Valentin Hofmann, Anjali Kantharuban, Anna Cai, Ritam Dutt, Amey Hengle, Anubha Kabra, Atharva Kulkarni, Abhishek Vijayakumar, Haofei Yu, Hinrich Schuetze, Kemal Oflazer, and David Mortensen. 2023. Counting the Bugs in ChatGPT’s Wugs: A Multilingual Investigation into the Morphological Capabilities of a Large Language Model. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 6508–6524, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Counting the Bugs in ChatGPT’s Wugs: A Multilingual Investigation into the Morphological Capabilities of a Large Language Model (Weissweiler et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.401.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.401.mp4