Does Language Model Understand Language?

Abstract

Despite advances in natural language generation and understanding, LM still struggle with fine grained linguistic phenomena such as tense, negation, voice, and modality which are the elements central to effective human communication. In the context of the United Nations SDG 4, where linguistic clarity is critical, the deployment of LMs in educational technologies demands careful scrutiny. As LMs are increasingly powering applications like tutoring systems, automated grading, and translation, their alignment with human linguistic interpretation becomes essential for effective learning. In this study, we conduct a evaluation of SOTA language models across these challenging contexts in both English and Bengali. To ensure a structured assessment, we introduce a new Route for Evaluation of Cognitive Inference in Systematic Environments guidelines. Our proposed LUCID dataset, composed of carefully crafted sentence pairs in English and Bengali, specifically challenges these models on critical aspects of language comprehension, including negation, tense, voice variations. We assess the performance of SOTA models including MISTRAL-SABA-24B, LLaMA-4-Scout-17B, LLaMA-3.3-70B, Gemma2-9B, and Compound-Beta using standard metrics like Pearson correlation, Spearman correlation, and Mean Absolute Error, as well as novel, linguistically inspired metric the HCE accuracy. The HCE accuracy measures how often model predictions fall within one standard deviation of the mean human rating, thus capturing human like tolerance for variability in language interpretation. Our findings highlight Compound-Beta as the most balanced model, consistently achieving high correlations and low MAEs across diverse language conditions. It records the highest Pearson correlation in English and demonstrates robust performance on mixed-language data, indicating a strong alignment with human judgments in cross lingual scenarios.