When Context Misleads: Surprisal, Energy and Attention Entropy as Metrics of Coherence Illusions in LLMs (opens in new tab)

Psycholinguistics studies show that human readers fall for coherence illusions: an incoherent discourse can seem coherent simply because a distractor matches what comes next. We investigate whether Dutch language models (6 monolingual and 4 multilingual) show the same behavior on texts that link back to earlier context with words such as 'again' and 'too'. First, we find that surprisal at the critical word tracks human acceptability judgments ...