Language Models Don't Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2402.11349v2
• Date: Thu, 6 Jun 2024 17:20:21 GMT
• Title: Language Models Don't Learn the Physical Manifestation of Language
• Authors: Bruce W. Lee, JaeHyuk Lim,
• Abstract summary: We argue that language-only models don't learn the physical manifestation of language. We present an empirical investigation of visual-auditory properties of language through a series of tasks, termed H-Test.
• Score: 0.3529736140137004
• License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
• Abstract: We argue that language-only models don't learn the physical manifestation of language. We present an empirical investigation of visual-auditory properties of language through a series of tasks, termed H-Test. These tasks highlight a fundamental gap between human linguistic understanding and the sensory-deprived linguistic understanding of LLMs. In support of our hypothesis, 1. deliberate reasoning (Chain-of-Thought), 2. few-shot examples, or 3. stronger LLM from the same model family (LLaMA 2 13B -> LLaMA 2 70B) has no significant effect on H-Test performance. We bring in the philosophical case of Mary, who learns about the world in a sensory-deprived environment as a useful conceptual framework to understand how language-only models learn about the world (Jackson, 1986). Our experiments show that some of the strongest proprietary LLMs stay near random chance baseline accuracy of 50%, highlighting the limitations of linguistic knowledge acquired in the absence of sensory experience. Our code and data are available at <github.com/brucewlee/h-test>.

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