From Tokens to Thoughts: How LLMs and Humans Trade Compression for Meaning

Humans organize knowledge into compact categories through semantic compression by mapping diverse instances to abstract representations while preserving meaning (e.g., robin and blue jay are both birds; most birds can fly). These concepts reflect a trade-off between expressive fidelity and representational simplicity. Large Language Models (LLMs) demonstrate remarkable linguistic abilities, yet whether their internal representations strike a human-like trade-off between compression and semantic fidelity is unclear. We introduce a novel information-theoretic framework, drawing from Rate-Distortion Theory and the Information Bottleneck principle, to quantitatively compare these strategies. Analyzing token embeddings from a diverse suite of LLMs against seminal human categorization benchmarks, we uncover key divergences. While LLMs form broad conceptual categories that align with human judgment, they struggle to capture the fine-grained semantic distinctions crucial for human understanding. More fundamentally, LLMs demonstrate a strong bias towards aggressive statistical compression, whereas human conceptual systems appear to prioritize adaptive nuance and contextual richness, even if this results in lower compressional efficiency by our measures. These findings illuminate critical differences between current AI and human cognitive architectures, guiding pathways toward LLMs with more human-aligned conceptual representations.

Cooking Up Creativity: A Cognitively-Inspired Approach for Enhancing LLM Creativity through Structured Representations

Large Language Models (LLMs) excel at countless tasks, yet struggle with creativity. In this paper, we introduce a novel approach that couples LLMs with structured representations and cognitively inspired manipulations to generate more creative and diverse ideas. Our notion of creativity goes beyond superficial token-level variations; rather, we explicitly recombine structured representations of existing ideas, allowing our algorithm to effectively explore the more abstract landscape of ideas. We demonstrate our approach in the culinary domain with DishCOVER, a model that generates creative recipes. Experiments comparing our model's results to those of GPT-4o show greater diversity. Domain expert evaluations reveal that our outputs, which are mostly coherent and feasible culinary creations, significantly surpass GPT-4o in terms of novelty, thus outperforming it in creative generation. We hope our work inspires further research into structured creativity in AI.

Labeling Messages as AI-Generated Does Not Reduce Their Persuasive Effects

As generative artificial intelligence (AI) enables the creation and dissemination of information at massive scale and speed, it is increasingly important to understand how people perceive AI-generated content. One prominent policy proposal requires explicitly labeling AI-generated content to increase transparency and encourage critical thinking about the information, but prior research has not yet tested the effects of such labels. To address this gap, we conducted a survey experiment (N=1601) on a diverse sample of Americans, presenting participants with an AI-generated message about several public policies (e.g., allowing colleges to pay student-athletes), randomly assigning whether participants were told the message was generated by (a) an expert AI model, (b) a human policy expert, or (c) no label. We found that messages were generally persuasive, influencing participants' views of the policies by 9.74 percentage points on average. However, while 94.6% of participants assigned to the AI and human label conditions believed the authorship labels, labels had no significant effects on participants' attitude change toward the policies, judgments of message accuracy, nor intentions to share the message with others. These patterns were robust across a variety of participant characteristics, including prior knowledge of the policy, prior experience with AI, political party, education level, or age. Taken together, these results imply that, while authorship labels would likely enhance transparency, they are unlikely to substantially affect the persuasiveness of the labeled content, highlighting the need for alternative strategies to address challenges posed by AI-generated information.

Rethinking Word Similarity: Semantic Similarity through Classification Confusion

Word similarity has many applications to social science and cultural analytics tasks like measuring meaning change over time and making sense of contested terms. Yet traditional similarity methods based on cosine similarity between word embeddings cannot capture the context-dependent, asymmetrical, polysemous nature of semantic similarity. We propose a new measure of similarity, Word Confusion, that reframes semantic similarity in terms of feature-based classification confusion. Word Confusion is inspired by Tversky's suggestion that similarity features be chosen dynamically. Here we train a classifier to map contextual embeddings to word identities and use the classifier confusion (the probability of choosing a confounding word c instead of the correct target word t) as a measure of the similarity of c and t. The set of potential confounding words acts as the chosen features. Our method is comparable to cosine similarity in matching human similarity judgments across several datasets (MEN, WirdSim353, and SimLex), and can measure similarity using predetermined features of interest. We demonstrate our model's ability to make use of dynamic features by applying it to test a hypothesis about changes in the 18th C. meaning of the French word "revolution" from popular to state action during the French Revolution. We hope this reimagining of semantic similarity will inspire the development of new tools that better capture the multi-faceted and dynamic nature of language, advancing the fields of computational social science and cultural analytics and beyond.

Towards Concept-Aware Large Language Models

Concepts play a pivotal role in various human cognitive functions, including learning, reasoning and communication. However, there is very little work on endowing machines with the ability to form and reason with concepts. In particular, state-of-the-art large language models (LLMs) work at the level of tokens, not concepts. In this work, we analyze how well contemporary LLMs capture human concepts and their structure. We then discuss ways to develop concept-aware LLMs, taking place at different stages of the pipeline. We sketch a method for pretraining LLMs using concepts, and also explore the simpler approach that uses the output of existing LLMs. Despite its simplicity, our proof-of-concept is shown to better match human intuition, as well as improve the robustness of predictions. These preliminary results underscore the promise of concept-aware LLMs.

FAME: Flexible, Scalable Analogy Mappings Engine

Analogy is one of the core capacities of human cognition; when faced with new situations, we often transfer prior experience from other domains. Most work on computational analogy relies heavily on complex, manually crafted input. In this work, we relax the input requirements, requiring only names of entities to be mapped. We automatically extract commonsense representations and use them to identify a mapping between the entities. Unlike previous works, our framework can handle partial analogies and suggest new entities to be added. Moreover, our method's output is easily interpretable, allowing for users to understand why a specific mapping was chosen. Experiments show that our model correctly maps 81.2% of classical 2x2 analogy problems (guess level=50%). On larger problems, it achieves 77.8% accuracy (mean guess level=13.1%). In another experiment, we show our algorithm outperforms human performance, and the automatic suggestions of new entities resemble those suggested by humans. We hope this work will advance computational analogy by paving the way to more flexible, realistic input requirements, with broader applicability.

The Lean Data Scientist: Recent Advances towards Overcoming the Data Bottleneck

Machine learning (ML) is revolutionizing the world, affecting almost every field of science and industry. Recent algorithms (in particular, deep networks) are increasingly data-hungry, requiring large datasets for training. Thus, the dominant paradigm in ML today involves constructing large, task-specific datasets. However, obtaining quality datasets of such magnitude proves to be a difficult challenge. A variety of methods have been proposed to address this data bottleneck problem, but they are scattered across different areas, and it is hard for a practitioner to keep up with the latest developments. In this work, we propose a taxonomy of these methods. Our goal is twofold: (1) We wish to raise the community's awareness of the methods that already exist and encourage more efficient use of resources, and (2) we hope that such a taxonomy will contribute to our understanding of the problem, inspiring novel ideas and strategies to replace current annotation-heavy approaches.

How Did This Get Funded?! Automatically Identifying Quirky Scientific Achievements

Humor is an important social phenomenon, serving complex social and psychological functions. However, despite being studied for millennia humor is computationally not well understood, often considered an AI-complete problem. In this work, we introduce a novel setting in humor mining: automatically detecting funny and unusual scientific papers. We are inspired by the Ig Nobel prize, a satirical prize awarded annually to celebrate funny scientific achievements (example past winner: "Are cows more likely to lie down the longer they stand?"). This challenging task has unique characteristics that make it particularly suitable for automatic learning. We construct a dataset containing thousands of funny papers and use it to learn classifiers, combining findings from psychology and linguistics with recent advances in NLP. We use our models to identify potentially funny papers in a large dataset of over 630,000 articles. The results demonstrate the potential of our methods, and more broadly the utility of integrating state-of-the-art NLP methods with insights from more traditional disciplines.

"Alexa, what do you do for fun?" Characterizing playful requests with virtual assistants

Virtual assistants such as Amazon's Alexa, Apple's Siri, Google Home, and Microsoft's Cortana, are becoming ubiquitous in our daily lives and successfully help users in various daily tasks, such as making phone calls or playing music. Yet, they still struggle with playful utterances, which are not meant to be interpreted literally. Examples include jokes or absurd requests or questions such as, "Are you afraid of the dark?", "Who let the dogs out?", or "Order a zillion gummy bears". Today, virtual assistants often return irrelevant answers to such utterances, except for hard-coded ones addressed by canned replies. To address the challenge of automatically detecting playful utterances, we first characterize the different types of playful human-virtual assistant interaction. We introduce a taxonomy of playful requests rooted in theories of humor and refined by analyzing real-world traffic from Alexa. We then focus on one node, personification, where users refer to the virtual assistant as a person ("What do you do for fun?"). Our conjecture is that understanding such utterances will improve user experience with virtual assistants. We conducted a Wizard-of-Oz user study and showed that endowing virtual assistant s with the ability to identify humorous opportunities indeed has the potential to increase user satisfaction. We hope this work will contribute to the understanding of the landscape of the problem and inspire novel ideas and techniques towards the vision of giving virtual assistants a sense of humor.

Language (Re)modelling: Towards Embodied Language Understanding

While natural language understanding (NLU) is advancing rapidly, today's technology differs from human-like language understanding in fundamental ways, notably in its inferior efficiency, interpretability, and generalization. This work proposes an approach to representation and learning based on the tenets of embodied cognitive linguistics (ECL). According to ECL, natural language is inherently executable (like programming languages), driven by mental simulation and metaphoric mappings over hierarchical compositions of structures and schemata learned through embodied interaction. This position paper argues that the use of grounding by metaphoric inference and simulation will greatly benefit NLU systems, and proposes a system architecture along with a roadmap towards realizing this vision.