Leivada, Dentella & Günther (2024). Evaluating the language abilities of humans vs. Large Language Models: Three caveats

Autors:

Evelina Leivada, Vittoria Dentella & Fritz Günther

Títol:

Biolinguistics, vol.18

Editorial: PsychOpen
Data de publicació: 19 abril, 2024

Text complet

We identify and analyze three caveats that may arise when analyzing the linguistic abilities of Large Language Models. The problem of unlicensed generalizations refers to the danger of interpreting performance in one task as predictive of the models’ overall capabilities, based on the assumption that because a specific task performance is indicative of certain underlying capabilities in humans, the same association holds for models. The human-like paradox refers to the problem of lacking human comparisons, while at the same time attributing human-like abilities to the models. Last, the problem of double standards refers to the use of tasks and methodologies that either cannot be applied to humans or they are evaluated differently in models vs. humans. While we recognize the impressive linguistic abilities of LLMs, we conclude that specific claims about the models’ human-likeness in the grammatical domain are premature.

Fernández-Sánchez & Ott (2020). Dislocations

Autors:

Javier Fernández Sánchez & Dennis Ott

Títol:

Dislocations

Editorial: Language and Linguistics Compass, Vol.14 issue 9 (John Wiley & Sons Ltd)
Data de publicació: Setembre 2020

Text complet

Dislocation is a kind of construction in which a phrasal constituent (the dislocate) appears at the outer left or right edge of a gap-less clause (its host) that contains a pronominal correlate of the dislocate. Dislocations are widely attested and presumably universally available across languages. The construction raises a number of problems for core assumptions of syntactic theory, in that these assumptions appear to thwart any coherent resolution of the question of how the dislocate relates to the internal structure of its host. This contribution is divided into two parts. In Part 1, we review central empirical properties of dislocation, which, taken together, appear to defy the laws of syntax as commonly assumed. In Part 2, we review key proposals that have emerged over the last decennia to resolve this paradox and restore dislocations to normalcy.