Large Language Models for Psycholinguistic Plausibility Pretesting
This addresses the problem of automating material pretesting for psycholinguists, offering a potential efficiency gain but is incremental as it shows limitations in fine-grained applications.
The study investigated whether language models (LMs) can generate plausibility judgments for psycholinguistic pretesting, finding that GPT-4's judgments highly correlate with human judgments across various linguistic structures, but it works well only for coarse-grained judgments and not for fine-grained ones.
In psycholinguistics, the creation of controlled materials is crucial to ensure that research outcomes are solely attributed to the intended manipulations and not influenced by extraneous factors. To achieve this, psycholinguists typically pretest linguistic materials, where a common pretest is to solicit plausibility judgments from human evaluators on specific sentences. In this work, we investigate whether Language Models (LMs) can be used to generate these plausibility judgements. We investigate a wide range of LMs across multiple linguistic structures and evaluate whether their plausibility judgements correlate with human judgements. We find that GPT-4 plausibility judgements highly correlate with human judgements across the structures we examine, whereas other LMs correlate well with humans on commonly used syntactic structures. We then test whether this correlation implies that LMs can be used instead of humans for pretesting. We find that when coarse-grained plausibility judgements are needed, this works well, but when fine-grained judgements are necessary, even GPT-4 does not provide satisfactory discriminative power.