Is artificial intelligence still intelligence? LLMs generalize to novel adjective-noun pairs, but don’t mimic the full human distribution

Hayley Ross, Kathryn Davidson, Najoung Kim


Abstract
Inferences from adjective-noun combinations like “Is artificial intelligence still intelligence?” provide a good test bed for LLMs’ understanding of meaning and compositional generalization capability, since there are many combinations which are novel to both humans and LLMs but nevertheless elicit convergent human judgments. We study a range of LLMs and find that the largest models we tested are able to draw human-like inferences when the inference is determined by context and can generalize to unseen adjective-noun combinations. We also propose three methods to evaluate LLMs on these inferences out of context, where there is a distribution of human-like answers rather than a single correct answer. We find that LLMs show a human-like distribution on at most 75% of our dataset, which is promising but still leaves room for improvement.
Anthology ID:
2024.genbench-1.9
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd GenBench Workshop on Generalisation (Benchmarking) in NLP
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Dieuwke Hupkes, Verna Dankers, Khuyagbaatar Batsuren, Amirhossein Kazemnejad, Christos Christodoulopoulos, Mario Giulianelli, Ryan Cotterell
Venue:
GenBench
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
131–153
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.genbench-1.9
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hayley Ross, Kathryn Davidson, and Najoung Kim. 2024. Is artificial intelligence still intelligence? LLMs generalize to novel adjective-noun pairs, but don’t mimic the full human distribution. In Proceedings of the 2nd GenBench Workshop on Generalisation (Benchmarking) in NLP, pages 131–153, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Is artificial intelligence still intelligence? LLMs generalize to novel adjective-noun pairs, but don’t mimic the full human distribution (Ross et al., GenBench 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.genbench-1.9.pdf