Meaning Beyond Truth Conditions: Evaluating Discourse Level Understanding via Anaphora Accessibility
Xiaomeng Zhu, Zhenghao Zhou, Simon Charlow, Robert Frank
Abstract
We present a hierarchy of natural language understanding abilities and argue for the importance of moving beyond assessments of understanding at the lexical and sentence levels to the discourse level. We propose the task of anaphora accessibility as a diagnostic for assessing discourse understanding, and to this end, present an evaluation dataset inspired by theoretical research in dynamic semantics. We evaluate human and LLM performance on our dataset and find that LLMs and humans align on some tasks and diverge on others. Such divergence can be explained by LLMs’ reliance on specific lexical items during language comprehension, in contrast to human sensitivity to structural abstractions.
BibTeX
@inproceedings{zhu-etal-2025-meaning,
title = "Meaning Beyond Truth Conditions: Evaluating Discourse Level Understanding via Anaphora Accessibility",
author = "Zhu, Xiaomeng and
Zhou, Zhenghao and
Charlow, Simon and
Frank, Robert",
editor = "Che, Wanxiang and
Nabende, Joyce and
Shutova, Ekaterina and
Pilehvar, Mohammad Taher",
booktitle = "Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)",
month = jul,
year = "2025",
address = "Vienna, Austria",
publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
url = "https://aclanthology.org/2025.acl-long.432/",
doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.acl-long.432",
pages = "8824--8842",
ISBN = "979-8-89176-251-0"
}