arXiv subjects

Sina Zarrieß

Publications and source records attributed to Sina Zarrieß.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Child-directed speech facilitates production, not comprehension, in BabyLMs

Recent studies suggest that child-directed speech is not conducive to language learning in BabyLMs. However, current evaluations focus predominantly on comprehension and not production, which is central to usage-based theories of language acquisition which argue how CDS facilitates early language use through constructional ''frames'' (frequent lexical patterns with open slots). We introduce a novel generation-based evaluation inspired by such theories in form of a frame-completion task, and compare Llama models trained with CDS, the BabyLM corpus, and web-crawl data (FineWeb-edu) on comprehension benchmarks and our novel framework. Our results reveal a clear dissociation between models' comprehension and production capabilities: while FineWeb-trained models excel at minimal pairs, CDS-trained models produce grammatical completions substantially earlier in training and concentrate probability mass on appropriate slot-fillers. These findings show that comprehension benchmarks underestimate what CDS affords to BabyLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

The Frequency Confound in Language-Model Surprisal and Metaphor Novelty

Language-model (LM) surprisal is widely used as a proxy for contextual predictability and has been reported to correlate with metaphor novelty judgments. However, surprisal is tightly intertwined with lexical frequency. We explore this interaction on metaphor novelty ratings using two different word frequency measures. We analyse surprisal estimates from eight Pythia model sizes and 154 training checkpoints. Across settings, word frequency is a stronger predictor of metaphor novelty than surprisal. Across training stages, the surprisal--novelty association peaks at an early stage and then falls again, mirroring a similarly timed increase in the surprisal--frequency association. These results suggest that the often-reported optimal LM surprisal settings may incorrectly associate contextual predictability with metaphor novelty and processing difficulty, whereas lexical frequency may be the major underlying factor.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Reference Games as a Testbed for the Alignment of Model Uncertainty and Clarification Requests

In human conversation, both interlocutors play an active role in maintaining mutual understanding. When listeners are uncertain about what speakers mean, for example, they can request clarification. It is an open question for language models whether they can assume a similar listener role, recognizing and expressing their own uncertainty through clarification. We argue that reference games are a suitable testbed to approach this question as they are controlled, self-contained, and make clarification needs explicit and measurable. To test this, we evaluate three vision-language models comparing a baseline reference resolution task to an experiment where the models are instructed to request clarification when uncertain. The results suggest that even in such simple tasks, models often struggle to recognize internal uncertainty and translate it into adequate clarification behavior. This demonstrates the value of reference games as testbeds for interaction qualities of (vision and) language models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Talking to a Know-It-All GPT or a Second-Guesser Claude? How Repair reveals unreliable Multi-Turn Behavior in LLMs

Repair, an important resource for resolving trouble in human-human conversation, remains underexplored in human-LLM interaction. In this study, we investigate how LLMs engage in the interactive process of repair in multi-turn dialogues around solvable and unsolvable math questions. We examine whether models initiate repair themselves and how they respond to user-initiated repair. Our results show strong differences across models: reactions range from being almost completely resistant to (appropriate) repair attempts to being highly susceptible and easily manipulated. We further demonstrate that once conversations extend beyond a single turn, model behavior becomes more distinctive and less predictable across systems. Overall, our findings indicate that each tested LLM exhibits its own characteristic form of unreliability in the context of repair.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

How Hypocritical Is Your LLM judge? Listener-Speaker Asymmetries in the Pragmatic Competence of Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly studied as repositories of linguistic knowledge. In this line of work, models are commonly evaluated both as generators of language and as judges of linguistic output, yet these two roles are rarely examined in direct relation to one another. As a result, it remains unclear whether success in one role aligns with success in the other. In this paper, we address this question for pragmatic competence by comparing LLMs' performance as pragmatic listeners, judging the appropriateness of linguistic outputs, and as pragmatic speakers, generating pragmatically appropriate language. We evaluate multiple open-weight and proprietary LLMs across three pragmatic settings. We find a robust asymmetry between pragmatic evaluation and pragmatic generation: many models perform substantially better as listeners than as speakers. Our results suggest that pragmatic judging and pragmatic generation are only weakly aligned in current LLMs, calling for more integrated evaluation practices.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

Surprisal and Metaphor Novelty Judgments: Moderate Correlations and Divergent Scaling Effects Revealed by Corpus-Based and Synthetic Datasets

Novel metaphor comprehension involves complex semantic processes and linguistic creativity, making it an interesting task for studying language models (LMs). This study investigates whether surprisal, a probabilistic measure of predictability in LMs, correlates with annotations of metaphor novelty in different datasets. We analyse the surprisal of metaphoric words in corpus-based and synthetic metaphor datasets using 16 causal LM variants. We propose a cloze-style surprisal method that conditions on full-sentence context. Results show that LM surprisal yields significant moderate correlations with scores/labels of metaphor novelty. We further identify divergent scaling patterns: on corpus-based data, correlation strength decreases with model size (inverse scaling effect), whereas on synthetic data it increases (quality-power hypothesis). We conclude that while surprisal can partially account for annotations of metaphor novelty, it remains limited as a metric of linguistic creativity. Code and data are publicly available: https://github.com/OmarMomen14/surprisal-metaphor-novelty

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

SemCSE-Multi: Multifaceted and Decodable Embeddings for Aspect-Specific and Interpretable Scientific Domain Mapping

We propose SemCSE-Multi, a novel unsupervised framework for generating multifaceted embeddings of scientific abstracts, evaluated in the domains of invasion biology and medicine. These embeddings capture distinct, individually specifiable aspects in isolation, thus enabling fine-grained and controllable similarity assessments as well as adaptive, user-driven visualizations of scientific domains. Our approach relies on an unsupervised procedure that produces aspect-specific summarizing sentences and trains embedding models to map semantically related summaries to nearby positions in the embedding space. We then distill these aspect-specific embedding capabilities into a unified embedding model that directly predicts multiple aspect embeddings from a scientific abstract in a single, efficient forward pass. In addition, we introduce an embedding decoding pipeline that decodes embeddings back into natural language descriptions of their associated aspects. Notably, we show that this decoding remains effective even for unoccupied regions in low-dimensional visualizations, thus offering vastly improved interpretability in user-centric settings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Enhancing Domain-Specific Encoder Models with LLM-Generated Data: How to Leverage Ontologies, and How to Do Without Them

We investigate the use of LLM-generated data for continual pretraining of encoder models in specialized domains with limited training data, using the scientific domain of invasion biology as a case study. To this end, we leverage domain-specific ontologies by enriching them with LLM-generated data and pretraining the encoder model as an ontology-informed embedding model for concept definitions. To evaluate the effectiveness of this method, we compile a benchmark specifically designed for assessing model performance in invasion biology. After demonstrating substantial improvements over standard LLM pretraining, we investigate the feasibility of applying the proposed approach to domains without comprehensive ontologies by substituting ontological concepts with concepts automatically extracted from a small corpus of scientific abstracts and establishing relationships between concepts through distributional statistics. Our results demonstrate that this automated approach achieves comparable performance using only a small set of scientific abstracts, resulting in a fully automated pipeline for enhancing domain-specific understanding of small encoder models that is especially suited for application in low-resource settings and achieves performance comparable to masked language modeling pretraining on much larger datasets.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LLMs Struggle to Reject False Presuppositions when Misinformation Stakes are High

This paper examines how LLMs handle false presuppositions and whether certain linguistic factors influence their responses to falsely presupposed content. Presuppositions subtly introduce information as given, making them highly effective at embedding disputable or false information. This raises concerns about whether LLMs, like humans, may fail to detect and correct misleading assumptions introduced as false presuppositions, even when the stakes of misinformation are high. Using a systematic approach based on linguistic presupposition analysis, we investigate the conditions under which LLMs are more or less sensitive to adopt or reject false presuppositions. Focusing on political contexts, we examine how factors like linguistic construction, political party, and scenario probability impact the recognition of false presuppositions. We conduct experiments with a newly created dataset and examine three LLMs: OpenAI's GPT-4-o, Meta's LLama-3-8B, and MistralAI's Mistral-7B-v03. Our results show that the models struggle to recognize false presuppositions, with performance varying by condition. This study highlights that linguistic presupposition analysis is a valuable tool for uncovering the reinforcement of political misinformation in LLM responses.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Dialogue Is Not Enough to Make a Communicative BabyLM (But Neither Is Developmentally Inspired Reinforcement Learning)

We investigate whether pre-training exclusively on dialogue data results in formally and functionally apt small language models. Based on this pre-trained llamalogue model, we employ a variety of fine-tuning strategies to enforce "more communicative" text generations by our models. Although our models underperform on most standard BabyLM benchmarks, they excel at dialogue continuation prediction in a minimal pair setting. While PPO fine-tuning has mixed to adversarial effects on our models, DPO fine-tuning further improves their performance on our custom dialogue benchmark.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Are BabyLMs Deaf to Gricean Maxims? A Pragmatic Evaluation of Sample-efficient Language Models

Implicit meanings are integral to human communication, making it essential for language models to be capable of identifying and interpreting them. Grice (1975) proposed a set of conversational maxims that guide cooperative dialogue, noting that speakers may deliberately violate these principles to express meanings beyond literal words, and that listeners, in turn, recognize such violations to draw pragmatic inferences. Building on Surian et al. (1996)'s study of children's sensitivity to violations of Gricean maxims, we introduce a novel benchmark to test whether language models pretrained on less than 10M and less than 100M tokens can distinguish maxim-adhering from maxim-violating utterances. We compare these BabyLMs across five maxims and situate their performance relative to children and a Large Language Model (LLM) pretrained on 3T tokens. We find that overall, models trained on less than 100M tokens outperform those trained on less than 10M, yet fall short of child-level and LLM competence. Our results suggest that modest data increases improve some aspects of pragmatic behavior, leading to finer-grained differentiation between pragmatic dimensions.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

The InviTE Corpus: Annotating Invectives in Tudor English Texts for Computational Modeling

In this paper, we aim at the application of Natural Language Processing (NLP) techniques to historical research endeavors, particularly addressing the study of religious invectives in the context of the Protestant Reformation in Tudor England. We outline a workflow spanning from raw data, through pre-processing and data selection, to an iterative annotation process. As a result, we introduce the InviTE corpus -- a corpus of almost 2000 Early Modern English (EModE) sentences, which are enriched with expert annotations regarding invective language throughout 16th-century England. Subsequently, we assess and compare the performance of fine-tuned BERT-based models and zero-shot prompted instruction-tuned large language models (LLMs), which highlights the superiority of models pre-trained on historical data and fine-tuned to invective detection.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LLM-Powered Virtual Patient Agents for Interactive Clinical Skills Training with Automated Feedback

Objective Structured Clinical Examinations (OSCEs) are essential for medical training, but they require significant resources, including professional actors and expert medical feedback. Although Large Language Models (LLMs) have introduced text-based virtual patients for communication practice, these simulations often lack the capability for richer, non-textual interactions. This paper presents a novel framework that significantly enhances LLM-based simulated patients by equipping them with action spaces, thereby enabling more realistic and dynamic patient behaviors that extend beyond text. Furthermore, our system incorporates virtual tutors that provide students with instant, personalized feedback on their performance at any time during these simulated encounters. We have conducted a rigorous evaluation of the framework's real-time performance, including system latency and component accuracy. Preliminary evaluations with medical experts assessed the naturalness and coherence of the simulated patients, as well as the usefulness and appropriateness of the virtual tutor's assessments. This innovative system provides medical students with a low-cost, accessible platform for personalized OSCE preparation at home.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

Rationalizing Transformer Predictions via End-To-End Differentiable Self-Training

We propose an end-to-end differentiable training paradigm for stable training of a rationalized transformer classifier. Our approach results in a single model that simultaneously classifies a sample and scores input tokens based on their relevance to the classification. To this end, we build on the widely-used three-player-game for training rationalized models, which typically relies on training a rationale selector, a classifier and a complement classifier. We simplify this approach by making a single model fulfill all three roles, leading to a more efficient training paradigm that is not susceptible to the common training instabilities that plague existing approaches. Further, we extend this paradigm to produce class-wise rationales while incorporating recent advances in parameterizing and regularizing the resulting rationales, thus leading to substantially improved and state-of-the-art alignment with human annotations without any explicit supervision.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Do Construction Distributions Shape Formal Language Learning In German BabyLMs?

We analyze the influence of utterance-level construction distributions in German child-directed/child-available speech on the resulting word-level, syntactic and semantic competence (and their underlying learning trajectories) in small LMs, which we train on a novel collection of developmentally plausible language data for German. We find that trajectories are surprisingly robust for markedly different distributions of constructions in the training data, which have little effect on final accuracies and almost no effect on global learning trajectories. While syntax learning benefits from more complex utterances, word-level learning culminates in better scores with more fragmentary utterances. We argue that LMs trained on developmentally plausible data can contribute to debates on how conducive different kinds of linguistic stimuli are to language learning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

SceneGram: Conceptualizing and Describing Tangrams in Scene Context

Research on reference and naming suggests that humans can come up with very different ways of conceptualizing and referring to the same object, e.g. the same abstract tangram shape can be a "crab", "sink" or "space ship". Another common assumption in cognitive science is that scene context fundamentally shapes our visual perception of objects and conceptual expectations. This paper contributes SceneGram, a dataset of human references to tangram shapes placed in different scene contexts, allowing for systematic analyses of the effect of scene context on conceptualization. Based on this data, we analyze references to tangram shapes generated by multimodal LLMs, showing that these models do not account for the richness and variability of conceptualizations found in human references.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Are Multimodal Large Language Models Pragmatically Competent Listeners in Simple Reference Resolution Tasks?

We investigate the linguistic abilities of multimodal large language models in reference resolution tasks featuring simple yet abstract visual stimuli, such as color patches and color grids. Although the task may not seem challenging for today's language models, being straightforward for human dyads, we consider it to be a highly relevant probe of the pragmatic capabilities of MLLMs. Our results and analyses indeed suggest that basic pragmatic capabilities, such as context-dependent interpretation of color descriptions, still constitute major challenges for state-of-the-art MLLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Can LLMs Ground when they (Don't) Know: A Study on Direct and Loaded Political Questions

Communication among humans relies on conversational grounding, allowing interlocutors to reach mutual understanding even when they do not have perfect knowledge and must resolve discrepancies in each other's beliefs. This paper investigates how large language models (LLMs) manage common ground in cases where they (don't) possess knowledge, focusing on facts in the political domain where the risk of misinformation and grounding failure is high. We examine the ability of LLMs to answer direct knowledge questions and loaded questions that presuppose misinformation. We evaluate whether loaded questions lead LLMs to engage in active grounding and correct false user beliefs, in connection to their level of knowledge and their political bias. Our findings highlight significant challenges in LLMs' ability to engage in grounding and reject false user beliefs, raising concerns about their role in mitigating misinformation in political discourse.

cs.CL↗