Does GPT-4 surpass human performance in linguistic pragmatics?
This research addresses the problem of evaluating AI's ability to simulate human-like understanding of context and implied meanings, which is incremental as it builds on existing LLM testing but shows specific gains in pragmatics.
This study investigated whether large language models (LLMs) can surpass human performance in interpreting linguistic pragmatics, using dialogue-based tasks based on Gricean principles, and found that GPT-4 achieved the highest score of 4.80, outperforming the best human score of 4.55 and other LLMs.
As Large Language Models (LLMs) become increasingly integrated into everyday life as general purpose multimodal AI systems, their capabilities to simulate human understanding are under examination. This study investigates LLMs ability to interpret linguistic pragmatics, which involves context and implied meanings. Using Grice communication principles, we evaluated both LLMs (GPT-2, GPT-3, GPT-3.5, GPT-4, and Bard) and human subjects (N = 147) on dialogue-based tasks. Human participants included 71 primarily Serbian students and 76 native English speakers from the United States. Findings revealed that LLMs, particularly GPT-4, outperformed humans. GPT4 achieved the highest score of 4.80, surpassing the best human score of 4.55. Other LLMs performed well: GPT 3.5 scored 4.10, Bard 3.75, and GPT-3 3.25. GPT-2 had the lowest score of 1.05. The average LLM score was 3.39, exceeding the human cohorts averages of 2.80 (Serbian students) and 2.34 (U.S. participants). In the ranking of all 155 subjects (including LLMs and humans), GPT-4 secured the top position, while the best human ranked second. These results highlight significant progress in LLMs ability to simulate understanding of linguistic pragmatics. Future studies should confirm these findings with more dialogue-based tasks and diverse participants. This research has important implications for advancing general-purpose AI models in various communication-centered tasks, including potential application in humanoid robots in the future.