In psycholinguistics, the creation of controlled materials is crucial to ensure that research outcomes are solely attributed to the intended manipulations and not influenced by extraneous factors. To achieve this, psycholinguists typically pretest linguistic materials, where a common pretest is to solicit plausibility judgments from human evaluators on specific sentences. In this work, we investigate whether Language Models (LMs) can be used to generate these plausibility judgements. We investigate a wide range of LMs across multiple linguistic structures and evaluate whether their plausibility judgements correlate with human judgements. We find that GPT-4 plausibility judgements highly correlate with human judgements across the structures we examine, whereas other LMs correlate well with humans on commonly used syntactic structures. We then test whether this correlation implies that LMs can be used instead of humans for pretesting. We find that when coarse-grained plausibility judgements are needed, this works well, but when fine-grained judgements are necessary, even GPT-4 does not provide satisfactory discriminative power.

Existing benchmarks for open-domain question answering (ODQA) typically focus on questions whose answers are all in a single paragraph. By contrast, many natural questions, such as “What players were drafted by the Brooklyn Nets?” have a long list of answers extracted from multiple paragraphs. Answering such questions requires retrieving and reading many passages from a large corpus. We introduce QAMPARI, an ODQA benchmark, where answers are lists of entities, spread across many paragraphs. We created QAMPARI by (a) generating questions with multiple answers from Wikipedia’s knowledge graph and tables, (b) automatically pairing answers with supporting evidence in Wikipedia paragraphs, and (c) manually paraphrasing questions and validating each answer. Across a wide range of ODQA models, we find that QAMPARI is challenging in terms of both passage retrieval and answer generation, with models reaching an F1 score of 32.8 at best. We view QAMPARI as a valuable resource for ODQA research, which will aid to develop models that handle a broad range of question types, including single and multi-answer questions.