How Much Do LLMs Know About Chinese Zero Pronouns?

Linguistic ambiguity is critical to the robustness of Large Language Models (LLMs), yet existing research focuses mostly on English, with limited attention devoted to Chinese. Existing Chinese ambiguity datasets (e.g., CHAmbi) suffer from poor scalability. Guided by Potential Ambiguity (PA) Theory, we design a semi-automatic pipeline to construct CHA-Gen. It is the first PA Theory-grounded Chinese ambiguity dataset, which comprises 5,712 sentences (2,414 ambiguous, 3,298 unambiguous) across 18 potential ambiguous structures. Evaluating LLMs (e.g. Gemma 3, Qwen 2.5/3 series) via direct querying and machine translation, we find that LLMs struggle with ambiguity detection (improved by CoT prompting). Analysis of Qwen3-32B's CoT rationales reveals three common failure modes: ambiguity blindness, misattribution, and premature resolution. Uncertainty quantification with semantic entropy metric shows higher uncertainty for ambiguous sentences. Moreover, instruction tuning induces overconfidence, whereas Base models better capture semantic diversity. We further observe that models exhibit a bias toward dominant interpretations. Our work provides a scalable approach for Chinese ambiguity corpus and insights into LLMs' ambiguity handling, laying a foundation for enhancing Chinese ambiguity research in LLMs.

We investigate the extent to which the language processing of LLMs resembles human cognitive processes, focusing on a human cognitive bias called the $\textit{neglect-zero effect}$. This effect refers to the human tendency to ignore $\textit{zero-models}$, which are configurations that render a proposition vacuously true by virtue of an empty set. We focus on two types of inferences driven by the neglect-zero effect, and examine how LLMs process these inferences by comparing their behavior with that in an inference that does not involve the neglect-zero effect. For this purpose, we employ a paradigm based on $\textit{structural priming}$, where recent exposure to a preceding sentence (the $\textit{prime}$) facilitates the processing of a subsequent sentence (the $\textit{target}$) due to their structural similarity. We prepare primes to force LLMs to consider the zero-model, and analyze whether they also consider it in the target. The results suggest that the neglect-zero effect may not occur in the LLMs analyzed in this study. Our code is available at https://github.com/ynklab/neglect_zero

Discourse particles, such as well and kind of, are crucial components that enable LLMs to "speak" more like humans. They are used to convey emotions, intentions, and interpersonal attitudes. However, existing studies have not yet built a comprehensive understanding of LLMs' capabilities in handling discourse particles. Moreover, the limited number of research focuses primarily on high-resource languages such as English, with little attention paid to Southeast Asian languages. In this paper, we (1) propose MalayPrag, a benchmark designed to systematically evaluate and analyze LLMs' capabilities in handling discourse particles in colloquial Malay; (2) introduce five attributes that provide a theoretically grounded, unified framework for interpreting pragmatic functions of discourse particles. Applying these two, we prompt ten off-the-shelf LLMs to perform three prediction tasks. The experimental results reveal substantial challenges for current LLMs to accurately connect discourse particles and their pragmatic functions in Malay. The provision of the five attributes designed in this study is found to significantly improve the connections, highlighting the need for structured scaffolding for models' pragmatic competence.