Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic. Generative Evaluation of Non-Literal Intent Resolution in LLMs

• URL: http://arxiv.org/abs/2405.08760v2
• Date: Wed, 19 Jun 2024 19:07:47 GMT
• Title: Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic. Generative Evaluation of Non-Literal Intent Resolution in LLMs
• Abstract summary: We evaluate large language models' (LLMs') intention understanding by examining their responses to non-literal utterances. Our findings show that LLMs struggle to generate pragmatically relevant responses to non-literal language.
• Score: 29.09074652003724
• License: http://arxiv.org/licenses/nonexclusive-distrib/1.0/
• Abstract: Humans often express their communicative intents indirectly or non-literally, which requires their interlocutors -- human or AI -- to understand beyond the literal meaning of words. While most existing work has focused on discriminative evaluations, we present a new approach to generatively evaluate large language models' (LLMs') intention understanding by examining their responses to non-literal utterances. Ideally, an LLM should respond in line with the true intention of a non-literal utterance, not its literal interpretation. Our findings show that LLMs struggle to generate pragmatically relevant responses to non-literal language, achieving only 50-55% accuracy on average. While explicitly providing oracle intentions significantly improves performance (e.g., 75% for Mistral-Instruct), this still indicates challenges in leveraging given intentions to produce appropriate responses. Using chain-of-thought to make models spell out intentions yields much smaller gains (60% for Mistral-Instruct). These findings suggest that LLMs are not yet effective pragmatic interlocutors, highlighting the need for better approaches for modeling intentions and utilizing them for pragmatic generation.

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