Are they lovers or friends? Evaluating LLMs' Social Reasoning in English and Korean Dialogues
On the map: LLM reasoning → Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation
Abstract (arXiv)
As LLMs are increasingly deployed in real-world interactions, their social reasoning in interpersonal communication becomes critical. To explore their capabilities, we introduce SCRIPTS, a 1.1k-dialogue dataset in English and Korean, sourced from movie scripts and propose a social reasoning task based on SCRIPTS that evaluates the capacity of LLMs to infer the social relationships (e.g., friends, lovers) between speakers in each dialogue. Evaluating nine models on our task, current LLMs achieve around 75--80% on the English dataset and 58--69% in Korean, and models predict an Unlikely relationship in 10--25% of responses in both languages. Furthermore, we find that thinking models and chain-of-thought prompting provide minimal benefits for social reasoning and occasionally amplify social biases. In sum, there are significant limitations in current LLMs' social reasoning capabilities, especially for Korean, highlighting the need for efforts to develop socially-aware LLMs across languages.
Key facts. Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026). Placed in Reasoning benchmarks and evaluation, one of 17 directions in LLM reasoning. Builds on 13 of its 29 references that are in the map. First posted on arXiv 21 Oct 2025.
Builds on
13 of 29 references.
Closest ancestors · 4
Same direction, newest first
- 2025EXAONE 4.0: Unified Large Language Models Integrating Non-reasoning and Reasoning Modes15 Jul
- 2025Qwen3 Technical Report14 May
- 2025Hypothesis-Driven Theory-of-Mind Reasoning for Large Language Models17 Feb
- 2023DiPlomat: A Dialogue Dataset for Situated Pragmatic Reasoning15 Jun
Other references · 9
- 2024The Llama 3 Herd of Modelscited by 14,715
- 2021Experts, Errors, and Context: A Large-Scale Study of Human Evaluation for Machine Translationcited by 338
- 2020Dialogue-Based Relation Extractioncited by 68
- 2023SocialDial: A Benchmark for Socially-Aware Dialogue Systemscited by 22
- 2025Kanana: Compute-efficient Bilingual Language Modelscited by 20
- 2024PeerGPT: Probing the Roles of LLM-based Peer Agents as Team Moderators and Participants in Children's Collaborative Learningcited by 18
- 2020DDRel: A New Dataset for Interpersonal Relation Classification in Dyadic Dialoguescited by 13
- 2022FineD-Eval: Fine-grained Automatic Dialogue-Level Evaluationcited by 13
- 2023Your spouse needs professional help: Determining the Contextual Appropriateness of Messages through Modeling Social Relationshipscited by 6
Built on by
Citing papers per year: 2025: 1; 2026: 2.
3 papers.
- 2025World in a Frame: Understanding Culture Mixing as a New Challenge for Vision-Language Modelscited by 3
- 2026Pseudo-Deliberation in Language Models: When Reasoning Fails to Align Values and Actionscited by 1
- 2026FriendBench: Benchmarking Dyadic Familiarity Inference in Humans and Multimodal Large Language Modelscited by 0
- 2026FriendBench: Benchmarking Dyadic Familiarity Inference in Humans and Multimodal Large Language Models31 Jul 2026
- 2026Pseudo-Deliberation in Language Models: When Reasoning Fails to Align Values and Actions11 May 2026
- 2025World in a Frame: Understanding Culture Mixing as a New Challenge for Vision-Language Models27 Nov 2025
Similar, not cited
Close in wording, no citation either way
- 2023Do LLMs Understand Social Knowledge? Evaluating the Sociability of Large Language Models with SocKET Benchmark
- 2025SI-Bench: Benchmarking Social Intelligence of Large Language Models in Human-to-Human Conversations
- 2023Understanding Social Reasoning in Language Models with Language Models
- 2025SocialNLI: A Dialogue-Centric Social Inference Dataset
- 2026PIVOTSBench: Evaluating Fine-Grained Interpersonal Relationship Reasoning in Multimodal Large Language Models
- 2025SocialMaze: A Benchmark for Evaluating and Enhancing Social Reasoning in Large Language Models in Complex Social Environments
- 2025How Social is It? A Benchmark for LLMs' Capabilities in Multi-user Multi-turn Social Agent Tasks
- 2026EUDAIMONIA: Evaluating Undesirable Dynamics in AI