{"pk":21606,"title":"Do large language models resolve semantic ambiguities in the same way as humans? The case of word segmentation in Chinese sentence reading","subtitle":null,"abstract":"Large language models (LLMs) were trained to predict words without having explicit semantic word representations as humans do. Here we compared LLMs and humans in re-solving semantic ambiguities at the word/token level by ex-amining the case of segmenting overlapping ambiguous strings in Chinese sentence reading, where three characters “ABC” could be segmented in either “AB/C” or “A/BC” depending on the context. We showed that although LLMs performed worse than humans, they demonstrated a similar interaction effect between segmentation structure and word frequency order, suggesting that this effect observed in humans could be accounted for by statistical learning of word/token occurrence regularities without assuming an explicit semantic word representation. Nevertheless, across stimuli LLMs' responses were not correlated with any hu-man performance or eye movement measures, suggesting differences in the underlying processing mechanisms. Thus, it is essential to understand these differences through XAI methods to facilitate LLM adoption.","language":"eng","license":{"name":"","short_name":"","text":null,"url":""},"keywords":[{"word":"Psychology; Reading; Eye tracking; Large Language Models"}],"section":"Papers with Poster Presentation","is_remote":true,"remote_url":"https://escholarship.org/uc/item/2sm8g139","frozenauthors":[{"first_name":"Weiyan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Liao","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Hong Kong","department":""},{"first_name":"Zixuan","middle_name":"","last_name":"Wang","name_suffix":"","institution":"City University of Hong Kong","department":""},{"first_name":"Kathy","middle_name":"","last_name":"Shum","name_suffix":"","institution":"University of Hong Kong","department":""},{"first_name":"Antoni","middle_name":"B.","last_name":"Chan","name_suffix":"","institution":"City University of Hong Kong","department":""},{"first_name":"Janet","middle_name":"","last_name":"Hsiao","name_suffix":"","institution":"Hong Kong University of Science & Technology","department":""}],"date_submitted":null,"date_accepted":null,"date_published":"2024-01-01T19:00:00+01:00","render_galley":null,"galleys":[{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21606/galley/11205/download/"},{"label":"PDF","type":"pdf","path":"https://journalpub.escholarship.org/cognitivesciencesociety/article/21606/galley/21999/download/"}]}