Constanza Fierro, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Fantine Huot, Nicola De Cao, Joshua Maynez, Shashi Narayan, Mirella Lapata. Proceedings of the 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Fantine Huot, Joshua Maynez, Chris Alberti, Reinald Kim Amplayo, Priyanka Agrawal, Constanza Fierro, Shashi Narayan, Mirella Lapata. Proceedings of the 18th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2024.

Knowledge claims are abundant in the literature on large language models (LLMs); but can we say that GPT-4 truly "knows" the Earth is round?To address this question, we review standard definitions of knowledge in epistemology and we formalize interpretations applicable to LLMs.In doing so, we identify inconsistencies and gaps in how current NLP research conceptualizes knowledge with respect to epistemological frameworks.Additionally, we conduct a survey of 100 professional philosophers and computer scientists to compare their preferences in knowledge definitions and their views on whether LLMs can really be said to know.Finally, we suggest evaluation protocols for testing knowledge in accordance to the most relevant definitions.

Abstract Large-scale pretrained language models (LMs) are said to “lack the ability to connect utterances to the world” (Bender and Koller, 2020), because they do not have “mental models of the world” (Mitchell and Krakauer, 2023). If so, one would expect LM representations to be unrelated to representations induced by vision models. We present an empirical evaluation across four families of LMs (BERT, GPT-2, OPT, and LLaMA-2) and three vision model architectures (ResNet, SegFormer, and MAE). Our experiments show that LMs partially converge towards representations isomorphic to those of vision models, subject to dispersion, polysemy, and frequency. This has important implications for both multi-modal processing and the LM understanding debate (Mitchell and Krakauer, 2023).1

Daniel Hershcovich, Stella Frank, Heather Lent, Miryam de Lhoneux, Mostafa Abdou, Stephanie Brandl, Emanuele Bugliarello, Laura Cabello Piqueras, Ilias Chalkidis, Ruixiang Cui, Constanza Fierro, Katerina Margatina, Phillip Rust, Anders Søgaard. Proceedings of the 60th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers). 2022.