@inproceedings{conde-etal-2025-psycholinguistic,
title = "Psycholinguistic Word Features: a New Approach for the Evaluation of {LLM}s Alignment with Humans",
author = "Conde, Javier and
Saiz, Miguel Gonz{\'a}lez and
Grandury, Mar{\'i}a and
Reviriego, Pedro and
Mart{\'i}nez, Gonzalo and
Brysbaert, Marc",
editor = "Arviv, Ofir and
Clinciu, Miruna and
Dhole, Kaustubh and
Dror, Rotem and
Gehrmann, Sebastian and
Habba, Eliya and
Itzhak, Itay and
Mille, Simon and
Perlitz, Yotam and
Santus, Enrico and
Sedoc, Jo{\~a}o and
Shmueli Scheuer, Michal and
Stanovsky, Gabriel and
Tafjord, Oyvind",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM{\texttwosuperior})",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria and virtual meeting",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.gem-1.2/",
pages = "8--17",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-261-9",
abstract = "The evaluation of LLMs has so far focused primarily on how well they can perform different tasks such as reasoning, question-answering, paraphrasing, or translating. For most of these tasks, performance can be measured with objective metrics, such as the number of correct answers. However, other language features are not easily quantified. For example, arousal, concreteness, or gender associated with a given word, as well as the extent to which we experience words with senses and relate them to a specific sense. Those features have been studied for many years by psycholinguistics, conducting large-scale experiments with humans to produce ratings for thousands of words. This opens an opportunity to evaluate how well LLMs align with human ratings on these word features, taking advantage of existing studies that cover many different language features in a large number of words. In this paper, we evaluate the alignment of a representative group of LLMs with human ratings on two psycholinguistic datasets: the Glasgow and Lancaster norms. These datasets cover thirteen features over thousands of words. The results show that alignment is significantly better on the Glasgow norms evaluated (arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, and gender) than on the Lancaster norms evaluated (introceptive, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, auditory, and visual). This suggests a limitation of current LLMs in aligning with human sensory associations for words, which may be due to their lack of embodied cognition present in humans and illustrates the usefulness of evaluating LLMs with psycholinguistic datasets."
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<abstract>The evaluation of LLMs has so far focused primarily on how well they can perform different tasks such as reasoning, question-answering, paraphrasing, or translating. For most of these tasks, performance can be measured with objective metrics, such as the number of correct answers. However, other language features are not easily quantified. For example, arousal, concreteness, or gender associated with a given word, as well as the extent to which we experience words with senses and relate them to a specific sense. Those features have been studied for many years by psycholinguistics, conducting large-scale experiments with humans to produce ratings for thousands of words. This opens an opportunity to evaluate how well LLMs align with human ratings on these word features, taking advantage of existing studies that cover many different language features in a large number of words. In this paper, we evaluate the alignment of a representative group of LLMs with human ratings on two psycholinguistic datasets: the Glasgow and Lancaster norms. These datasets cover thirteen features over thousands of words. The results show that alignment is significantly better on the Glasgow norms evaluated (arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, and gender) than on the Lancaster norms evaluated (introceptive, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, auditory, and visual). This suggests a limitation of current LLMs in aligning with human sensory associations for words, which may be due to their lack of embodied cognition present in humans and illustrates the usefulness of evaluating LLMs with psycholinguistic datasets.</abstract>
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%0 Conference Proceedings
%T Psycholinguistic Word Features: a New Approach for the Evaluation of LLMs Alignment with Humans
%A Conde, Javier
%A Saiz, Miguel González
%A Grandury, María
%A Reviriego, Pedro
%A Martínez, Gonzalo
%A Brysbaert, Marc
%Y Arviv, Ofir
%Y Clinciu, Miruna
%Y Dhole, Kaustubh
%Y Dror, Rotem
%Y Gehrmann, Sebastian
%Y Habba, Eliya
%Y Itzhak, Itay
%Y Mille, Simon
%Y Perlitz, Yotam
%Y Santus, Enrico
%Y Sedoc, João
%Y Shmueli Scheuer, Michal
%Y Stanovsky, Gabriel
%Y Tafjord, Oyvind
%S Proceedings of the Fourth Workshop on Generation, Evaluation and Metrics (GEM²)
%D 2025
%8 July
%I Association for Computational Linguistics
%C Vienna, Austria and virtual meeting
%@ 979-8-89176-261-9
%F conde-etal-2025-psycholinguistic
%X The evaluation of LLMs has so far focused primarily on how well they can perform different tasks such as reasoning, question-answering, paraphrasing, or translating. For most of these tasks, performance can be measured with objective metrics, such as the number of correct answers. However, other language features are not easily quantified. For example, arousal, concreteness, or gender associated with a given word, as well as the extent to which we experience words with senses and relate them to a specific sense. Those features have been studied for many years by psycholinguistics, conducting large-scale experiments with humans to produce ratings for thousands of words. This opens an opportunity to evaluate how well LLMs align with human ratings on these word features, taking advantage of existing studies that cover many different language features in a large number of words. In this paper, we evaluate the alignment of a representative group of LLMs with human ratings on two psycholinguistic datasets: the Glasgow and Lancaster norms. These datasets cover thirteen features over thousands of words. The results show that alignment is significantly better on the Glasgow norms evaluated (arousal, valence, dominance, concreteness, imageability, familiarity, and gender) than on the Lancaster norms evaluated (introceptive, gustatory, olfactory, haptic, auditory, and visual). This suggests a limitation of current LLMs in aligning with human sensory associations for words, which may be due to their lack of embodied cognition present in humans and illustrates the usefulness of evaluating LLMs with psycholinguistic datasets.
%U https://aclanthology.org/2025.gem-1.2/
%P 8-17
Markdown (Informal)
[Psycholinguistic Word Features: a New Approach for the Evaluation of LLMs Alignment with Humans](https://aclanthology.org/2025.gem-1.2/) (Conde et al., GEM 2025)
ACL