Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic Generative Evaluation of Non-Literal Intent Resolution in LLMs
<|reference_start|>Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic Generative Evaluation of Non-Literal Intent Resolution in LLMs: Humans often express their communicative intents indirectly or non-literally, which requires their interlocutors -- human or AI -- to understand beyond the literal meaning of words. While most existing work has focused on discriminative evaluations, we present a new approach to generatively evaluate large language models' (LLMs') intention understanding by examining their responses to non-literal utterances. Ideally, an LLM should respond in line with the true intention of a non-literal utterance, not its literal interpretation. Our findings show that LLMs struggle to generate pragmatically relevant responses to non-literal language, achieving only 50-55% accuracy on average. While explicitly providing oracle intentions significantly improves performance (e.g., 75% for Mistral-Instruct), this still indicates challenges in leveraging given intentions to produce appropriate responses. Using chain-of-thought to make models spell out intentions yields much smaller gains (60% for Mistral-Instruct). These findings suggest that LLMs are not yet effective pragmatic interlocutors, highlighting the need for better approaches for modeling intentions and utilizing them for pragmatic generation.<|reference_end|>
@article{yerukola2024is,
    title={Is the Pope Catholic? Yes, the Pope is Catholic. Generative Evaluation
  of Non-Literal Intent Resolution in LLMs},
    author={Akhila Yerukola, Saujas Vaduguru, Daniel Fried, Maarten Sap},
    journal={arXiv preprint arXiv:2405.08760},
    year={2024},
    archivePrefix={arXiv},
    eprint={2405.08760},
    primaryClass={cs.CL cs.AI}
}