Prompts and probabilities in the linguistic assessment of language models: Evidence from semantic focus-sensitivity
arXiv:2610.39923v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As language models (LMs) have improved, an increasingly common means of evaluating their linguistic competence is through explicit prompting (e.g., "Which sentence is more acceptable?"). Prior work indicates that such prompting underperforms compared to standard token-probability-based methods in smaller models, but improves in larger models. We test this in a new domain: semantic focus-sensitivity, responsible for contrasts like "Lucy only SWAM…