In each case, the ambiguity persists even when the database context is provided.

Large Language Models (LLMs) display remarkable capabilities to understand or even produce political discourse, but have been found to consistently display a progressive left-leaning bias. At the same time, so-called persona or identity prompts have been shown to produce LLM behavior that aligns with socioeconomic groups that the base model is not aligned with. In this work, we analyze whether zero-shot persona prompting with limited information can accurately predict individual voting decisions and, by aggregation, accurately predict positions of European groups on a diverse set of policies. We evaluate if predictions are stable towards counterfactual arguments, different persona prompts and generation methods. Finally, we find that we can simulate voting behavior of Members of the European Parliament reasonably well with a weighted F1 score of approximately 0.793. Our persona dataset of politicians in the 2024 European Parliament and our code are available at https://github.com/dess-mannheim/european_parliament_simulation.

While large language models (LLMs) are generally considered proficient in generating language, how similar their language usage is to that of humans remains understudied. In this paper, we test whether models exhibit linguistic convergence, a core pragmatic element of human language communication, asking: do models adapt, or converge, to the linguistic patterns of their user? To answer this, we systematically compare model completions of exisiting dialogues to the original human responses across sixteen language models, three dialogue corpora, and a variety of stylometric features. We find that models strongly converge to the conversation's style, often significantly overfitting relative to the human baseline. While convergence patterns are often feature-specific, we observe consistent shifts in convergence across modeling settings, with instruction-tuned and larger models converging less than their pretrained counterparts. Given the differences between human and model convergence patterns, we hypothesize that the underlying mechanisms for these behaviors are very different.

Understanding and resolving temporal references is essential in Natural Language Understanding as we often refer to the past or future in daily communication. Although existing benchmarks address a system's ability to reason about and resolve temporal references, systematic evaluation of specific temporal references remains limited. Towards closing this gap, we introduce TRAVELER, a novel synthetic benchmark dataset that follows a Question Answering paradigm and consists of questions involving temporal references with the corresponding correct answers. TRAVELER assesses models' abilities to resolve explicit, implicit relative to speech time, and vague temporal references. Beyond investigating the performance of state-of-the-art LLMs depending on the type of temporal reference, our benchmark also allows evaluation of performance in relation to the length of the set of events. For the category of vague temporal references, ground-truth answers were established via human surveys on Prolific, following a procedure similar to the one from Kenneweg et al. To demonstrate the benchmark's applicability, we evaluate four state-of-the-art LLMs using a question-answering task encompassing 3,300 questions. Our findings show that while the benchmarked LLMs can answer questions over event sets with a handful of events and explicit temporal references successfully, performance clearly deteriorates with larger event set length and when temporal references get less explicit. Notably, the vague question category exhibits the lowest performance across all models. The benchmark is publicly available at: https://gitlab.ub.uni-bielefeld.de/s.kenneweg/TRAVELER

Large Language Models (LLMs) hold promise as dynamic instructional aids. Yet, it remains unclear whether LLMs can replicate the adaptivity of intelligent tutoring systems (ITS)--where student knowledge and pedagogical strategies are explicitly modeled. We propose a prompt variation framework to assess LLM-generated instructional moves' adaptivity and pedagogical soundness across 75 real-world tutoring scenarios from an ITS. We systematically remove key context components (e.g., student errors and knowledge components) from prompts to create variations of each scenario. Three representative LLMs (Llama3-8B, Llama3-70B, and GPT-4o) generate 1,350 instructional moves. We use text embeddings and randomization tests to measure how the omission of each context feature impacts the LLMs' outputs (adaptivity) and a validated tutor-training classifier to evaluate response quality (pedagogical soundness). Surprisingly, even the best-performing model only marginally mimics the adaptivity of ITS. Specifically, Llama3-70B demonstrates statistically significant adaptivity to student errors. Although Llama3-8B's recommendations receive higher pedagogical soundness scores than the other models, it struggles with instruction-following behaviors, including output formatting. By contrast, GPT-4o reliably adheres to instructions but tends to provide overly direct feedback that diverges from effective tutoring, prompting learners with open-ended questions to gauge knowledge. Given these results, we discuss how current LLM-based tutoring is unlikely to produce learning benefits rivaling known-to-be-effective ITS tutoring. Through our open-source benchmarking code, we contribute a reproducible method for evaluating LLMs' instructional adaptivity and fidelity.

Traditional retrieval methods rely on transforming user queries into vector representations and retrieving documents based on cosine similarity within an embedding space. While efficient and scalable, this approach often fails to handle complex queries involving logical constructs such as negations, conjunctions, and disjunctions. In this paper, we propose a novel inference-time logical reasoning framework that explicitly incorporates logical reasoning into the retrieval process. Our method extracts logical reasoning structures from natural language queries and then composes the individual cosine similarity scores to formulate the final document scores. This approach enables the retrieval process to handle complex logical reasoning without compromising computational efficiency. Our results on both synthetic and real-world benchmarks demonstrate that the proposed method consistently outperforms traditional retrieval methods across different models and datasets, significantly improving retrieval performance for complex queries.

Are LLMs Ready for Practical Adoption for Assertion Generation? Abstract --Assertions have been the de facto collateral for simulation-based and formal verification of hardware designs for over a decade. The quality of hardware verification, i.e., detection and diagnosis of corner-case design bugs, is critically dependent on the quality of the assertions. With the onset of generative AI such as Transformers and Large-Language Models (LLMs), there has been a renewed interest in developing novel, effective, and scalable techniques of generating functional and security assertions from design source code. While there have been recent works that use commercial-of-the-shelf (COTS) LLMs for assertion generation, there is no comprehensive study in quantifying the effectiveness of LLMs in generating syntactically and semantically correct assertions. In this paper, we first discuss AssertionBench from our prior work, a comprehensive set of designs and assertions to quantify the goodness of a broad spectrum of COTS LLMs for the task of assertion generations from hardware design source code. Our key insight was that COTS LLMs are not yet ready for prime-time adoption for assertion generation as they generate a considerable fraction of syntactically and semantically incorrect assertions. Motivated by the insight, we propose AssertionLLM, a first of its kind LLM model, specifically fine-tuned for assertion generation. Our initial experimental results show that AssertionLLM considerably improves the semantic and syntactic correctness of the generated assertions over COTS LLMs.

This study evaluates the performance of Large Language Models (LLMs) on SemEval-2020 Task 4 dataset, focusing on commonsense validation and explanation. Our methodology involves evaluating multiple LLMs, including LLaMA3-70B, Gemma2-9B, and Mixtral-8x7B, using zero-shot prompting techniques. The models are tested on two tasks: Task A (Commonsense Validation), where models determine whether a statement aligns with commonsense knowledge, and Task B (Commonsense Explanation), where models identify the reasoning behind implausible statements. Performance is assessed based on accuracy, and results are compared to fine-tuned transformer-based models. The results indicate that larger models outperform previous models and perform closely to human evaluation for Task A, with LLaMA3-70B achieving the highest accuracy of 98.40% in Task A whereas, lagging behind previous models with 93.40% in Task B. However, while models effectively identify implausible statements, they face challenges in selecting the most relevant explanation, highlighting limitations in causal and inferential reasoning.

Alzheimer's Disease (AD) early detection is critical for enabling timely intervention and improving patient outcomes. This paper presents a DMV framework using Llama3-70B and GPT-4o as embedding models to analyze clinical notes and predict a continuous risk score associated with early AD onset. Framing the task as a regression problem, we model the relationship between linguistic features in clinical notes (inputs) and a target variable (data value) that answers specific questions related to AD risk within certain topic categories. By leveraging a multi-faceted feature set that includes geolocation data, we capture additional environmental context potentially linked to AD. Our results demonstrate that the integration of the geolocation information significantly decreases the error of predicting early AD risk scores over prior models by 28.57% (Llama3-70B) and 33.47% (GPT4-o). Our findings suggest that this combined approach can enhance the predictive accuracy of AD risk assessment, supporting early diagnosis and intervention in clinical settings. Additionally, the framework's ability to incorporate geolocation data provides a more comprehensive risk assessment model that could help healthcare providers better understand and address environmental factors contributing to AD development.