Can Language Model Understand Word Semantics as A Chatbot? An Empirical Study of Language Model Internal External Mismatch

Jinman Zhao, Xueyan Zhang, Xingyu Yue, Weizhe Chen, Zifan Qian, Ruiyu Wang

Abstract: Current common interactions with language models is through full inference. This approach may not necessarily align with the model's internal knowledge. Studies show discrepancies between prompts and internal representations. Most focus on sentence understanding. We study the discrepancy of word semantics understanding in internal and external mismatch across Encoder-only, Decoder-only, and Encoder-Decoder pre-trained language models.