mlsanityData to 7 Oct 2026

Is It JUST Semantics? A Case Study of Discourse Particle Understanding in LLMs

arXiv 2506.04534 ↗First posted 5 Jun 2025cs.CL cs.AIcited by 3

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Abstract (arXiv)

Discourse particles are crucial elements that subtly shape the meaning of text. These words, often polyfunctional, give rise to nuanced and often quite disparate semantic/discourse effects, as exemplified by the diverse uses of the particle "just" (e.g., exclusive, temporal, emphatic). This work investigates the capacity of LLMs to distinguish the fine-grained senses of English "just", a well-studied example in formal semantics, using data meticulously created and labeled by expert linguists. Our findings reveal that while LLMs exhibit some ability to differentiate between broader categories, they struggle to fully capture more subtle nuances, highlighting a gap in their understanding of discourse particles.

Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 7 Oct 2026). Builds on 9 of its 30 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 5 Jun 2025.

Builds on

9 of 30 references.

References · 9

  1. 2019HuggingFace's Transformers: State-of-the-art Natural Language Processingcited by 2,201
  2. 2024OLMo: Accelerating the Science of Language Modelscited by 599
  3. 2019BLiMP: The Benchmark of Linguistic Minimal Pairs for Englishcited by 553
  4. 2020A Systematic Assessment of Syntactic Generalization in Neural Language Modelscited by 163
  5. 2022minicons: Enabling Flexible Behavioral and Representational Analyses of Transformer Language Modelscited by 58
  6. 2019Probing What Different NLP Tasks Teach Machines about Function Word Comprehensioncited by 44
  7. 2021Pragmatic competence of pre-trained language models through the lens of discourse connectivescited by 16
  8. 2021Is Incoherence Surprising? Targeted Evaluation of Coherence Prediction from Language Modelscited by 15
  9. 2024Are LLMs Good Annotators for Discourse-level Event Relation Extraction?cited by 7

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Cited by year (2026 to 7 Oct)

Citing papers per year: 2026: 3.

3 papers.

  1. 2026Accommodation and Epistemic Vigilance: A Pragmatic Account of Why LLMs Fail to Challenge Harmful Beliefscited by 8
  2. 2026Which course? Discourse! Teaching Discourse and Generation in the Era of LLMscited by 0
  3. 2026Can Large Language Models Handle Discourse Particles? A Case Study of Colloquial Malaycited by 0