Paper

Do language models capture implied discourse meanings? An investigation with exhaustivity implicatures of Korean morphology

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Abstract

Markedness in natural language is often associated with non-literal meanings in discourse. Differential Object Marking (DOM) in Korean is one instance of this phenomenon, where post-positional markers are selected based on both the semantic features of the noun phrases and the discourse features that are orthogonal to the semantic features. Previous work has shown that distributional models of language recover certain semantic features of words---do these models capture implied discourse-level meanings as well? We evaluate whether a set of large language models are capable of associating discourse meanings with different object markings in Korean. Results suggest that discourse meanings of a grammatical marker can  be more challenging to encode than that of a discourse marker.

Keywords: Distributional semantics, large language model, differential object marking, discourse, implicature, Korean

How to Cite:

Shin, H. & Trott, S., (2024) “Do language models capture implied discourse meanings? An investigation with exhaustivity implicatures of Korean morphology”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 7(1), 150–161. doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.2139