Larry Caused the Car to Stop, But the Model Didn't Notice: Transformer Blindness to the M-Heuristic

תקציר מקורי באנגליתarXiv:2609.37497v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Modern transformer models excel at capturing semantic relationships through sentence embeddings, yet their ability to perform pragmatic reasoning remains understudied. This paper investigates whether encoder-based transformers such as DeBERTa employ the M-Heuristic (the neo-Gricean principle that marked linguistic forms implicate marked meanings). We test this hypothesis by contrasting lexical causatives (e.g., ``Larry stopped the car'') with periphrastic causatives (e.g., ``Larry caused the car to stop'') using a Natural Language Inference framework. Our experiments across 188 conditions with 15 ambitransitive verbs reveal that DeBERTa, RoBERTa, and BART show no evidence of capturing the pragmatic distinction between these forms, with DeBERT