KRISTEVA: Close Reading as a Novel Task for Benchmarking Interpretive Reasoning

Each year, tens of millions of essays are written and graded in college-level English courses. Students are asked to analyze literary and cultural texts through a process known as close reading, in which they gather textual details to formulate evidence-based arguments. Despite being viewed as a basis for critical thinking and widely adopted as a required element of university coursework, close reading has never been evaluated on large language models (LLMs), and multi-discipline benchmarks like MMLU do not include literature as a subject. To fill this gap, we present KRISTEVA, the first close reading benchmark for evaluating interpretive reasoning, consisting of 1331 multiple-choice questions adapted from classroom data. With KRISTEVA, we propose three progressively more difficult sets of tasks to approximate different elements of the close reading process, which we use to test how well LLMs may seem to understand and reason about literary works: 1) extracting stylistic features, 2) retrieving relevant contextual information from parametric knowledge, and 3) multi-hop reasoning between style and external contexts. Our baseline results find that, while state-of-the-art LLMs possess some college-level close reading competency (accuracy 49.7% - 69.7%), their performances still trail those of experienced human evaluators on 10 out of our 11 tasks.

Confabulation: The Surprising Value of Large Language Model Hallucinations

This paper presents a systematic defense of large language model (LLM) hallucinations or 'confabulations' as a potential resource instead of a categorically negative pitfall. The standard view is that confabulations are inherently problematic and AI research should eliminate this flaw. In this paper, we argue and empirically demonstrate that measurable semantic characteristics of LLM confabulations mirror a human propensity to utilize increased narrativity as a cognitive resource for sense-making and communication. In other words, it has potential value. Specifically, we analyze popular hallucination benchmarks and reveal that hallucinated outputs display increased levels of narrativity and semantic coherence relative to veridical outputs. This finding reveals a tension in our usually dismissive understandings of confabulation. It suggests, counter-intuitively, that the tendency for LLMs to confabulate may be intimately associated with a positive capacity for coherent narrative-text generation.