Daily Papers

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly being used to summarize and verify claims in critical sources that inform consequential decisions. Such claims are full of plural definites. If three of five patients improved after taking drug A, the claim the patients improved after drug A is not true, since two did not, yet its negation, the patients didn't improve after drug A, is not true either, since three did. In formal semantics, this truth-value gap is known as the Homogeneity Gap: both the plural definite and its negation are neither true nor false when the property holds for only a fraction of the plural referent. A model that cannot represent this gap turns mixed evidence into a clean verdict, an error that can be costly in high-stakes use. We introduce HomogeneityNLI, a diagnostic dataset of 1,000 minimal pair items crossing determiner, polarity, and group composition across ten logical conditions. Evaluating seven open-weight models, we uncover a pervasive Bivalence Bias: models assign plural definites their homogeneous truth conditions. In the zero-shot setting, no model recognizes the gap for both polarities in more than 15% of scenarios, and negated definites are judged False in 84% of cases. Explicit linguistic rules, chain-of-thought, and enumeration prompts produce unstable, model-specific effects that often entrench the bias. Our findings indicate that current open-weight LLMs acquire the truth conditions of plural predication but not its trivalent logic, and cannot yet be trusted to summarize or verify claims whose evidence is mixed.

Recent debates raised concerns that language models may favor certain viewpoints. But what if the solution is not to aim for a 'view from nowhere' but rather to leverage different viewpoints? We introduce Plurals, a system and Python library for pluralistic AI deliberation. Plurals consists of Agents (LLMs, optionally with personas) which deliberate within customizable Structures, with Moderators overseeing deliberation. Plurals is a generator of simulated social ensembles. Plurals integrates with government datasets to create nationally representative personas, includes deliberation templates inspired by deliberative democracy, and allows users to customize both information-sharing structures and deliberation behavior within Structures. Six case studies demonstrate fidelity to theoretical constructs and efficacy. Three randomized experiments show simulated focus groups produced output resonant with an online sample of the relevant audiences (chosen over zero-shot generation in 75% of trials). Plurals is both a paradigm and a concrete system for pluralistic AI. The Plurals library is available at https://github.com/josh-ashkinaze/plurals and will be continually updated.

Language models perform well on grammatical agreement, but it is unclear whether this reflects rule-based generalization or memorization. We study this question for German definite singular articles, whose forms depend on gender and case. Using GRADIEND, a gradient-based interpretability method, we learn parameter update directions for gender-case specific article transitions. We find that updates learned for a specific gender-case article transition frequently affect unrelated gender-case settings, with substantial overlap among the most affected neurons across settings. These results argue against a strictly rule-based encoding of German definite articles, indicating that models at least partly rely on memorized associations rather than abstract grammatical rules.

State-of-the-art visual grounding models can achieve high detection accuracy, but they are not designed to distinguish between all objects versus only certain objects of interest. In natural language, in order to specify a particular object or set of objects of interest, humans use determiners such as "my", "either" and "those". Determiners, as an important word class, are a type of schema in natural language about the reference or quantity of the noun. Existing grounded referencing datasets place much less emphasis on determiners, compared to other word classes such as nouns, verbs and adjectives. This makes it difficult to develop models that understand the full variety and complexity of object referencing. Thus, we have developed and released the DetermiNet dataset , which comprises 250,000 synthetically generated images and captions based on 25 determiners. The task is to predict bounding boxes to identify objects of interest, constrained by the semantics of the given determiner. We find that current state-of-the-art visual grounding models do not perform well on the dataset, highlighting the limitations of existing models on reference and quantification tasks.

A simple machine learning model of pluralisation as a linear regression problem minimising a p-adic metric substantially outperforms even the most robust of Euclidean-space regressors on languages in the Indo-European, Austronesian, Trans New-Guinea, Sino-Tibetan, Nilo-Saharan, Oto-Meanguean and Atlantic-Congo language families. There is insufficient evidence to support modelling distinct noun declensions as a p-adic neighbourhood even in Indo-European languages.

Large language models (LLMs) are used worldwide, yet disproportionately reflect Western values, limiting their ability to represent diverse value systems. We introduce PLURAL, a large-scale, value-focused preference dataset grounded in the Integrated Values Survey (IVS), a nationally representative survey spanning 92 countries. Using a two-stage generation pipeline, we transform survey responses into synthetic preference triplets that preserve normative value signals while producing realistic scenarios. We release an initial version of PLURAL containing ~500,000 preference triplets representing people in 20 diverse countries. We evaluate PLURAL in three ways: (i) dataset-level validation showing that it preserves both cross-country value differences and within-country diversity from the original survey; (ii) automated evaluation showing that training on PLURAL improves alignment with target countries' cultural profiles, reducing mean absolute error by up to 27.7% relative to strong baselines; and (iii) blind human evaluation with 176 evaluators in India, Brazil, and Japan, who judge PLURAL-aligned responses as more representative of their national values. Together, these results show that PLURAL contains learnable signal for value steering, offering a scalable resource for pluralistic alignment. Dataset: https://huggingface.co/datasets/agdhruv/plural-alignment

This document offers a detailed linguistic description of SNACS (Semantic Network of Adposition and Case Supersenses; Schneider et al., 2018), an inventory of 52 semantic labels ("supersenses") that characterize the use of adpositions and case markers at a somewhat coarse level of granularity, as demonstrated in the STREUSLE corpus (https://github.com/nert-nlp/streusle/ ; version 4.5 tracks guidelines version 2.6). Though the SNACS inventory aspires to be universal, this document is specific to English; documentation for other languages will be published separately. Version 2 is a revision of the supersense inventory proposed for English by Schneider et al. (2015, 2016) (henceforth "v1"), which in turn was based on previous schemes. The present inventory was developed after extensive review of the v1 corpus annotations for English, plus previously unanalyzed genitive case possessives (Blodgett and Schneider, 2018), as well as consideration of adposition and case phenomena in Hebrew, Hindi, Korean, and German. Hwang et al. (2017) present the theoretical underpinnings of the v2 scheme. Schneider et al. (2018) summarize the scheme, its application to English corpus data, and an automatic disambiguation task. Liu et al. (2021) offer an English Lexical Semantic Recognition tagger that includes SNACS labels in its output. This documentation can also be browsed alongside corpus data on the Xposition website (Gessler et al., 2022): http://www.xposition.org/

The relationship between language model tokenization and performance is an open area of research. Here, we investigate how different tokenization schemes impact number agreement in Spanish plurals. We find that morphologically-aligned tokenization performs similarly to other tokenization schemes, even when induced artificially for words that would not be tokenized that way during training. We then present exploratory analyses demonstrating that language model embeddings for different plural tokenizations have similar distributions along the embedding space axis that maximally distinguishes singular and plural nouns. Our results suggest that morphologically-aligned tokenization is a viable tokenization approach, and existing models already generalize some morphological patterns to new items. However, our results indicate that morphological tokenization is not strictly required for performance.

The term islands in linguistics refers to phrases from which extracting an element results in ungrammaticality (Ross, 1967). Grammatical subjects are considered islands because extracting a sub-part of a subject results in an ill-formed sentence, despite having a clear intended meaning (e.g., "Which topic did the article about inspire you?"). The generative tradition, which views syntax as autonomous of meaning and function, attributes this ungrammaticality to the abstract movement dependency between the wh-phrase and the subject-internal position with which it is associated for interpretation. However, research on language that emphasizes its communicative function suggests instead that syntactic constraints, including islands, can be explained based on the way different constructions package information. Accordingly, Abeillé et al. (2020) suggest that the islandhood of subjects is specific to the information structure of wh-questions, and propose that subjects are not islands for movement, but for focusing, due to their discourse-backgroundedness. This predicts that other constructions that differ in their information structure from wh-questions, but still involve movement, should not create a subject island effect. We test this prediction in three large-scale acceptability studies, using a super-additive design that singles out subject island violations, in three different constructions: wh-questions, relative clauses, and topicalization. We report evidence for a subject island effect in each construction type, despite only wh-questions introducing what Abeillé et al. (2020) call "a clash in information structure." We argue that this motivates an account of islands in terms of abstract, syntactic representations, independent of the communicative function associated with the constructions.

We survey left 3-Engel elements in groups.

Generalized quantifiers (e.g., few, most) are used to indicate the proportions predicates are satisfied (for example, some apples are red). One way to interpret quantifier semantics is to explicitly bind these satisfactions with percentage scopes (e.g., 30%-40% of apples are red). This approach can be helpful for tasks like logic formalization and surface-form quantitative reasoning (Gordon and Schubert, 2010; Roy et al., 2015). However, it remains unclear if recent foundation models possess this ability, as they lack direct training signals. To explore this, we introduce QuRe, a crowd-sourced dataset of human-annotated generalized quantifiers in Wikipedia sentences featuring percentage-equipped predicates. We explore quantifier comprehension in language models using PRESQUE, a framework that combines natural language inference and the Rational Speech Acts framework. Experimental results on the HVD dataset and QuRe illustrate that PRESQUE, employing pragmatic reasoning, performs 20% better than a literal reasoning baseline when predicting quantifier percentage scopes, with no additional training required.