Language Models Don’t Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language

Bruce Lee, Jaehyuk Lim


Abstract
We argue that language-only models don’t learn the physical manifestation of language. We present an empirical investigation of visual-auditory properties of language through a series of tasks, termed H-Test.These tasks highlight a fundamental gap between human linguistic understanding and the sensory-deprived linguistic understanding of LLMs. In support of our hypothesis, 1. deliberate reasoning (Chain-of-Thought), 2. few-shot examples, or 3. stronger LLM from the same model family (LLaMA 2 13B -> LLaMA 2 70B) has no significant effect on H-Test performance. We bring in the philosophical case of Mary, who learns about the world in a sensory-deprived environment as a useful conceptual framework to understand how language-only models learn about the world (Jackson, 1986). Our experiments show that some of the strongest proprietary LLMs stay near random chance baseline accuracy of 50%, highlighting the limitations of linguistic knowledge acquired in the absence of sensory experience. Our code and data are available at <github.com/brucewlee/h-test>.
Anthology ID:
2024.acl-long.195
Volume:
Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Lun-Wei Ku, Andre Martins, Vivek Srikumar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
3554–3579
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.195
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bruce Lee and Jaehyuk Lim. 2024. Language Models Don’t Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language. In Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 3554–3579, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Language Models Don’t Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language (Lee & Lim, ACL 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.acl-long.195.pdf