To date, most investigations on surprisal and entropy effects in reading have been conducted on the group level, disregarding individual differences. In this work, we revisit the predictive power (PP) of different LMs’ surprisal and entropy measures on data of human reading times as a measure of processing effort by incorporating information of language users’ cognitive capacities. To do so, we assess the PP of surprisal and entropy estimated from generative language models (LMs) on reading data obtained from individuals who also completed a wide range of psychometric tests.Specifically, we investigate if modulating surprisal and entropy relative to cognitive scores increases prediction accuracy of reading times, and we examine whether LMs exhibit systematic biases in the prediction of reading times for cognitively high- or low-performing groups, revealing what type of psycholinguistic subjects a given LM emulates.Our study finds that in most cases, incorporating cognitive capacities increases predictive power of surprisal and entropy on reading times, and that generally, high performance in the psychometric tests is associated with lower sensitivity to predictability effects. Finally, our results suggest that the analyzed LMs emulate readers with lower verbal intelligence, suggesting that for a given target group (i.e., individuals with high verbal intelligence), these LMs provide less accurate predictability effect estimates.

Instruction-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) have recently showcased remarkable ability to generate fitting responses to natural language instructions. However, an open research question concerns the inherent biases of trained models and their responses. For instance, if the data used to tune an LLM is dominantly written by persons with a specific political bias, we might expect generated answers to share this bias. Current research work seeks to de-bias such models, or suppress potentially biased answers.With this demonstration, we take a different view on biases in instruction-tuning: Rather than aiming to suppress them, we aim to make them explicit and transparent. To this end, we present OpinionGPT, a web demo in which users can ask questions and select all biases they wish to investigate. The demo will answer this question using a model fine-tuned on text representing each of the selected biases, allowing side-by-side comparison. To train the underlying model, we identified 11 different biases (political, geographic, gender, age) and derived an instruction-tuning corpus in which each answer was written by members of one of these demographics. This paper presents OpinionGPT, illustrates how we trained the bias-aware model and showcases the web application (available at https://opiniongpt.informatik.hu-berlin.de).

Previous research on the predictive power (PP) of surprisal and entropy has focused on determining which language models (LMs) generate estimates with the highest PP on reading times, and examining for which populations the PP is strongest. In this study, we leverage eye movement data on texts that were generated using a range of decoding strategies with different LMs. We then extract the transition scores that reflect the models’ production rather than comprehension effort. This allows us to investigate the alignment of LM language production and human language comprehension. Our findings reveal that there are differences in the strength of the alignment between reading behavior and certain LM decoding strategies and that this alignment further reflects different stages of language understanding (early, late, or global processes). Although we find lower PP of transition-based measures compared to surprisal and entropy for most decoding strategies, our results provide valuable insights into which decoding strategies impose less processing effort for readers. Our code is available via https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/LM-human-alignment.

Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have showcased their exceptional abilities across various tasks, such as code generation, problem-solving and reasoning. Existing benchmarks evaluate tasks in isolation, yet the extent to which LLMs can understand prose-style tasks, identify the underlying problems, and then generate appropriate code solutions is still unexplored. Addressing this gap, we introduce PECC, a novel benchmark derived from Advent Of Code (AoC) challenges and Project Euler, including 2396 problems. Unlike conventional benchmarks, PECC requires LLMs to interpret narrative-embedded problems, extract requirements, and generate executable code. A key feature of our dataset is the complexity added by natural language prompting in chat-based evaluations, mirroring real-world instruction ambiguities. Results show varying model performance between narrative and neutral problems, with specific challenges in the Euler math-based subset with GPT-3.5-Turbo passing 50% of the AoC challenges and only 8% on the Euler problems. By probing the limits of LLMs’ capabilities, our benchmark provides a framework to monitor and assess the subsequent progress of LLMs as a universal problem solver.

Eye movements in reading play a crucial role in psycholinguistic research studying the cognitive mechanisms underlying human language processing. More recently, the tight coupling between eye movements and cognition has also been leveraged for language-related machine learning tasks such as the interpretability, enhancement, and pre-training of language models, as well as the inference of reader- and text-specific properties. However, scarcity of eye movement data and its unavailability at application time poses a major challenge for this line of research. Initially, this problem was tackled by resorting to cognitive models for synthesizing eye movement data. However, for the sole purpose of generating human-like scanpaths, purely data-driven machine-learning-based methods have proven to be more suitable. Following recent advances in adapting diffusion processes to discrete data, we propose ScanDL, a novel discrete sequence-to-sequence diffusion model that generates synthetic scanpaths on texts. By leveraging pre-trained word representations and jointly embedding both the stimulus text and the fixation sequence, our model captures multi-modal interactions between the two inputs. We evaluate ScanDL within- and across-dataset and demonstrate that it significantly outperforms state-of-the-art scanpath generation methods. Finally, we provide an extensive psycholinguistic analysis that underlines the model’s ability to exhibit human-like reading behavior. Our implementation is made available at https://github.com/DiLi-Lab/ScanDL.

Most NLP tasks are modeled as supervised learning and thus require labeled training data to train effective models. However, manually producing such data at sufficient quality and quantity is known to be costly and time-intensive. Current research addresses this bottleneck by exploring a novel paradigm called zero-shot learning via dataset generation. Here, a powerful LLM is prompted with a task description to generate labeled data that can be used to train a downstream NLP model. For instance, an LLM might be prompted to “generate 500 movie reviews with positive overall sentiment, and another 500 with negative sentiment.” The generated data could then be used to train a binary sentiment classifier, effectively leveraging an LLM as a teacher to a smaller student model. With this demo, we introduce Fabricator, an open-source Python toolkit for dataset generation. Fabricator implements common dataset generation workflows, supports a wide range of downstream NLP tasks (such as text classification, question answering, and entity recognition), and is integrated with well-known libraries to facilitate quick experimentation. With Fabricator, we aim to support researchers in conducting reproducible dataset generation experiments using LLMs and help practitioners apply this approach to train models for downstream tasks.

Eye movements are known to reflect cognitive processes in reading, and psychological reading research has shown that eye gaze patterns differ between readers with and without dyslexia. In recent years, researchers have attempted to classify readers with dyslexia based on their eye movements using Support Vector Machines (SVMs). However, these approaches (i) are based on highly aggregated features averaged over all words read by a participant, thus disregarding the sequential nature of the eye movements, and (ii) do not consider the linguistic stimulus and its interaction with the reader’s eye movements. In the present work, we propose two simple sequence models that process eye movements on the entire stimulus without the need of aggregating features across the sentence. Additionally, we incorporate the linguistic stimulus into the model in two ways—contextualized word embeddings and manually extracted linguistic features. The models are evaluated on a Mandarin Chinese dataset containing eye movements from children with and without dyslexia. Our results show that (i) even for a logographic script such as Chinese, sequence models are able to classify dyslexia on eye gaze sequences, reaching state-of-the-art performance, and (ii) incorporating the linguistic stimulus does not help to improve classification performance.

The uniform information density (UID) hypothesis posits a preference among language users for utterances structured such that information is distributed uniformly across a signal. While its implications on language production have been well explored, the hypothesis potentially makes predictions about language comprehension and linguistic acceptability as well. Further, it is unclear how uniformity in a linguistic signal—or lack thereof—should be measured, and over which linguistic unit, e.g., the sentence or language level, this uniformity should hold. Here we investigate these facets of the UID hypothesis using reading time and acceptability data. While our reading time results are generally consistent with previous work, they are also consistent with a weakly super-linear effect of surprisal, which would be compatible with UID’s predictions. For acceptability judgments, we find clearer evidence that non-uniformity in information density is predictive of lower acceptability. We then explore multiple operationalizations of UID, motivated by different interpretations of the original hypothesis, and analyze the scope over which the pressure towards uniformity is exerted. The explanatory power of a subset of the proposed operationalizations suggests that the strongest trend may be a regression towards a mean surprisal across the language, rather than the phrase, sentence, or document—a finding that supports a typical interpretation of UID, namely that it is the byproduct of language users maximizing the use of a (hypothetical) communication channel.