On Reality and the Limits of Language Data: Aligning LLMs with Human Norms

Abstract: Recent advancements in LLMs harness linguistic associations in vast natural language data for practical applications. However, their ability to understand the physical world using only language data remains a question. After reviewing existing protocols, we explore this question using a novel and tightly controlled reasoning test (ART) and compare human norms against versions of GPT-3. Our findings highlight the categories of common-sense relations models that could learn directly from data and areas of weakness. GPT-3 offers evidence for verbal reasoning on a par with human subjects for several relations including Synonymy, Antonymy, and Default inheritance, Without reinforcement learning from human judgements, it appears GPT-3 performs at the lower end of the reference interval for Has-part and Contained-in. Weaknesses were observed also in affordance characteristics through Necessary-quality, Order-of-size and Order-of-intensity. Combining LLMs with symbolic world grounding is a promising direction to address associative learning.