Perceptual Structure in the absence of grounding: the impact of abstractedness and subjectivity in color language for LLMs

Pablo Loyola, Edison Marrese-Taylor, Andres Hoyos-Idrobo


Abstract
The need for grounding in language understanding is an active research topic. Previous work has suggested that color perception and color language appear as a suitable test bed to empirically study the problem, given its cognitive significance and showing that there is considerable alignment between a defined color space and the feature space defined by a language model. To further study this issue, we collect a large scale source of colors and their descriptions, containing almost a 1 million examples , and perform an empirical analysis to compare two kinds of alignments: (i) inter-space, by learning a mapping between embedding space and color space, and (ii) intra-space, by means of prompting comparatives between color descriptions. Our results show that while color space alignment holds for monolexemic, highly pragmatic color descriptions, this alignment drops considerably in the presence of examples that exhibit elements of real linguistic usage such as subjectivity and abstractedness, suggesting that grounding may be required in such cases.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.102
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1536–1542
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.102
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.102
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Pablo Loyola, Edison Marrese-Taylor, and Andres Hoyos-Idrobo. 2023. Perceptual Structure in the absence of grounding: the impact of abstractedness and subjectivity in color language for LLMs. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 1536–1542, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Perceptual Structure in the absence of grounding: the impact of abstractedness and subjectivity in color language for LLMs (Loyola et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.102.pdf