@inproceedings{gu-etal-2023-language,
    title = "Do language models have coherent mental models of everyday things?",
    author = "Gu, Yuling  and
      Dalvi Mishra, Bhavana  and
      Clark, Peter",
    editor = "Rogers, Anna  and
      Boyd-Graber, Jordan  and
      Okazaki, Naoaki",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2023",
    address = "Toronto, Canada",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-long.106",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2023.acl-long.106",
    pages = "1892--1913",
    abstract = "When people think of everyday things like an egg, they typically have a mental image associated with it. This allows them to correctly judge, for example, that {``}the yolk surrounds the shell{''} is a false statement. Do language models similarly have a coherent picture of such everyday things? To investigate this, we propose a benchmark dataset consisting of 100 everyday things, their parts, and the relationships between these parts, expressed as 11,720 {``}X relation Y?{''} true/false questions. Using these questions as probes, we observe that state-of-the-art pre-trained language models (LMs) like GPT-3 and Macaw have fragments of knowledge about these everyday things, but do not have fully coherent {``}parts mental models{''} (54-59{\%} accurate, 19-43{\%} conditional constraint violation). We propose an extension where we add a constraint satisfaction layer on top of the LM{'}s raw predictions to apply commonsense constraints. As well as removing inconsistencies, we find that this also significantly improves accuracy (by 16-20{\%}), suggesting how the incoherence of the LM{'}s pictures of everyday things can be significantly reduced.",
}

When people think of everyday things like an egg, they typically have a mental image associated with it. This allows them to correctly judge, for example, that {``}the yolk surrounds the shell{''} is a false statement. Do language models similarly have a coherent picture of such everyday things? To investigate this, we propose a benchmark dataset consisting of 100 everyday things, their parts, and the relationships between these parts, expressed as 11,720 {``}X relation Y?{''} true/false questions. Using these questions as probes, we observe that state-of-the-art pre-trained language models (LMs) like GPT-3 and Macaw have fragments of knowledge about these everyday things, but do not have fully coherent {``}parts mental models{''} (54-59{\%} accurate, 19-43{\%} conditional constraint violation). We propose an extension where we add a constraint satisfaction layer on top of the LM{'}s raw predictions to apply commonsense constraints. As well as removing inconsistencies, we find that this also significantly improves accuracy (by 16-20{\%}), suggesting how the incoherence of the LM{'}s pictures of everyday things can be significantly reduced.
Gu, Yuling Dalvi Mishra, Bhavana Clark, Peter
Do language models have coherent mental models of everyday things?