Dang Thi Thao Anh


Fixing paper assignments

  1. Please select all papers that belong to the same person.
  2. Indicate below which author they should be assigned to.
Provide a valid ORCID iD here. This will be used to match future papers to this author.
Provide the name of the school or the university where the author has received or will receive their highest degree (e.g., Ph.D. institution for researchers, or current affiliation for students). This will be used to form the new author page ID, if needed.

TODO: "submit" and "cancel" buttons here


2025

pdf bib
Can LLMs Detect Ambiguous Plural Reference? An Analysis of Split-Antecedent and Mereological Reference
Dang Thi Thao Anh | Rick Nouwen | Massimo Poesio
Proceedings of the 8th BlackboxNLP Workshop: Analyzing and Interpreting Neural Networks for NLP

Our goal is to study how LLMs represent and interpret plural reference in ambiguous and unambiguous contexts. We ask the following research questions: (1) Do LLMs exhibit human-like preferences in representing plural reference? and (2) Are LLMs able to detect ambiguity in plural anaphoric expressions and identify possible referents? To address these questions, we design a set of experiments, examining pronoun production using next-token prediction tasks, pronoun interpretation, and ambiguity detection using different prompting strategies. We then assess how comparable LLMs are to humans in formulating and interpreting plural reference. We find that LLMs are sometimes aware of possible referents of ambiguous pronouns. However, they do not always follow human reference when choosing between interpretations, especially when the possible interpretation is not explicitly mentioned. In addition, they struggle to identify ambiguity without direct instruction. Our findings also reveal inconsistencies in the results across different types of experiments.