Meaning Beyond Truth Conditions: Evaluating Discourse Level Understanding via Anaphora Accessibility

ACL ARR 2025 February Submission5558 Authors

16 Feb 2025 (modified: 09 May 2025)ACL ARR 2025 February SubmissionEveryoneRevisionsBibTeXCC BY 4.0
Abstract: We present a hierarchy of natural language understanding abilities and argue for the importance of moving beyond assessments of understanding at the lexical and sentence levels to the discourse level. We propose the task of anaphora accessibility as a diagnostic for assessing discourse understanding, and to this end, present an evaluation dataset inspired by theoretical research in dynamic semantics. We evaluate human and LLM performance on our dataset and find that LLMs and humans align on some tasks and diverge on others. Such divergence can be explained by LLMs' reliance on specific lexical items during language comprehension, in contrast to human sensitivity to structural abstractions.
Paper Type: Long
Research Area: Discourse and Pragmatics
Research Area Keywords: anaphora resolution, coherence
Contribution Types: Model analysis & interpretability, Data analysis
Languages Studied: English
Submission Number: 5558
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