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

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2405.09293 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2405.09293/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 9 of its 29 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 15 May 2024.

## Builds on (most cited first, 9 of 9)

- [Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.08361/) (2020)
- [BERT Rediscovers the Classical NLP Pipeline](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.05950/) (2019)
- [What do you learn from context? Probing for sentence structure in contextualized word representations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.06316/) (2019)
- [Neural Language Models as Psycholinguistic Subjects: Representations of Syntactic State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1903.03260/) (2019)
- [Are Natural Language Inference Models IMPPRESsive? Learning IMPlicature and PRESupposition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03066/) (2020)
- [A fine-grained comparison of pragmatic language understanding in humans and language models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.06801/) (2022)
- [Do Large Language Models know what humans know?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2209.01515/) (2022)
- [Distributional Semantics and Linguistic Theory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1905.01896/) (2019)
- [RAW-C: Relatedness of Ambiguous Words--in Context (A New Lexical Resource for English)](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2105.13266/) (2021)

## Abstract (arXiv)

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.