- Conference Article
- 10.18653/v1/2024.starsem-1.34
Do large language models and humans have similar behaviours in causal inference with script knowledge?
- Jan 01, 2024
- Xudong Hong + 3 more +3
Recently, large pre-trained language models (LLMs) have demonstrated superior language understanding abilities, including zero-shot causal reasoning.However, it is unclear to what extent their capabilities are similar to human ones.We here study the processing of an event B in a script-based story, which causally depends on a previous event A. In our manipulation, event A is stated, negated, or omitted in an earlier section of the text.We first conducted a self-paced reading experiment, which showed that humans exhibit significantly longer reading times when causal conflicts exist (A B) than under logical conditions (A B).However, reading times remain similar when cause A is not explicitly mentioned, indicating that humans can easily infer event B from their script knowledge.We then tested a variety of LLMs on the same data to check to what extent the models replicate human behavior.Our experiments show that 1) only recent LLMs, like GPT-3 or Vicuna, correlate with human behavior in the A B condition.2) Despite this correlation, all models still fail to predict that nil B is less surprising than A B, indicating that LLMs still have difficulties integrating script knowledge.Code and data are available at https://github. com/tony-hong/causal-script.* These authors contributed equally to this work. .0.47 3.50 ** 0.09 5.25 *** Perceiver 201 -0.02 -0.51 n.s.0.04 0.79 n.s.0.01 1.29 n.s.Bigbird-roberta-base 167 0.05 0.34 n.s.-0.03 -0.13 n.s.0.03 2.62 ** BERT: base-uncased 133 0.14 1.71 n.s.0.21 2.00 .-0.00 -0.00 n.s.Nystromformer-512 132 0.06 1.50 n.s.0.04 0.80 n.s.-0.01 -0.46 n.s.ConvBERT: base 130 0.01 1.66 n.s.-0.00 -0.72 n.s.-0.00 -0.33 n.s.FNet-base 108 0.01 0.14 n.s.0.02 0.41 n.s.-0.01 -0.80 n.s.DistilBERT: base-uncased 90 0.12 2.08 .0.16 2.43 * -0.00 -0.01 n.s.Electra-large-generator 83 0.12 1.15 n.s.0.01 0.13 n.s.-0.01 -0.16 n.s.SqueezeBERT: uncased 75 0.13 1.63 n.s.0.21 2.40 * -0.04 -1.09 n.s.Electra-base-generator 57 0.12 2.69 * 0.08 1.25 n.s.-0.04 -1.15 n.s.Electra-small-generator 17 0.18 2.66 * 0.09 1.33 n.s.-0.03 -0.82 n.s.
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