Assessing the Effect of Context in Multi-domain Acceptability Judgment

Eunike Andriani Kardinata, Yusuke Sakai, Taro Watanabe


Abstract
Acceptability judgments provide a crucial basis for understanding how sentences are perceived as natural or well-formed, and they are increasingly used to assess the linguistic capability of large language models (LLMs). Unlike grammaticality, acceptability depends not only on structural form but also on contextual and domain-specific factors. Most prior work evaluates sentences in isolation, and relatively little is known about how explicit contextual cues influence LLM acceptability judgments across domains. This study examines how contextual information affects model-generated acceptability ratings across multiple domains and several LLMs, using different forms of domain-specific contextual cues to situate sentences in their intended usage settings. The results show that context can meaningfully shift model judgments, although its effects vary across models and domains. Overall, the findings provide evidence on contextual effects in LLM acceptability judgment and support the development of more context-aware evaluation frameworks.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-acl.2096
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026
Month:
July
Year:
2026
Address:
San Diego, California, United States
Editors:
Maria Liakata, Viviane P. Moreira, Jiajun Zhang, David Jurgens
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
42251–42266
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2096/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eunike Andriani Kardinata, Yusuke Sakai, and Taro Watanabe. 2026. Assessing the Effect of Context in Multi-domain Acceptability Judgment. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2026, pages 42251–42266, San Diego, California, United States. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Assessing the Effect of Context in Multi-domain Acceptability Judgment (Kardinata et al., Findings 2026)
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https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.findings-acl.2096.pdf
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