Pragmatic Reasoning in Language Models

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Overview

This field studies how language models interpret what people mean beyond literal wording, including implicatures, indirect requests, ambiguity, and culturally shaped conventions. Researchers use theory-based tests such as Rational Speech Act models, controlled benchmarks, and interactive dialogue tasks to examine how models track speaker beliefs, common ground, and conversational context. Results show that models can often recognize or judge pragmatic meanings more reliably than they can use them when generating responses, and explicit prompts or targeted training sometimes help. A central challenge is making these abilities robust across speakers, languages, and real interactions, where fluent or accurate answers do not necessarily show that a model understood the user’s intent.

Latest papers

CardsList

103 papers16 papers in the last four weeks, down 16% on the four weeks before. 0.1% of all new papers.

  1. Do Language Models Know Theo Has a Wife? Investigating the Proviso Problem

    Mar 9, 2026Tara Azin, Daniel Dumitrescu, Diana Inkpen +1Pragmatic Reasoning in Language ModelsLanguage Model Probing

    Carleton University, Canada · University of Ottawa, Canada

  2. Moral Mazes in the Era of LLMs

    Mar 6, 2026Dang Nguyen, Harvey Yiyun Fu, Peter West +2Pragmatic Reasoning in Language ModelsLanguage Model Generation Evaluation

    University of Chicago · University of British Columbia

  3. The Fragility Of Moral Judgment In Large Language Models

    Mar 5, 2026Tom van Nuenen, Pratik S. SachdevaMoral Reasoning in Language ModelsPrompt Sensitivity

    D-Lab, University of California, Berkeley, USA

  4. PleaSQLarify: Visual Pragmatic Repair for Natural Language Database Querying

    Mar 2, 2026Robin Shing Moon Chan, Rita Sevastjanova, Mennatallah El-AssadyPragmatic Reasoning in Language ModelsClarification Question Generation

    ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

  5. France or Spain or Germany or France: A Neural Account of Non-Redundant Redundant Disjunctions

    Feb 26, 2026Sasha Boguraev, Qing Yao, Kyle MahowaldPragmatic Reasoning in Language ModelsCircuits in Language Models

    Department of Linguistics, The University of Texas at Austin

  6. Scale Can't Overcome Pragmatics: The Impact of Reporting Bias on Vision-Language Reasoning

    Feb 26, 2026Amita Kamath, Jack Hessel, Khyathi Chandu +3VLM ReasoningReasoning for VLMs

    University of Washington · University of California, Los Angeles · Samaya AI +2

  7. Unmasking the Factual-Conceptual Gap in Persian Language Models

    Feb 19, 2026Alireza Sakhaeirad, Ali Ma'manpoosh, Arshia HemmatCultural Knowledge in Language ModelsPragmatic Reasoning in Language Models

    EPFL · University of Oxford

  8. ALPS: A Diagnostic Challenge Set for Arabic Linguistic & Pragmatic Reasoning

    Feb 19, 2026Hussein S. Al-Olimat, Ahmad AlshareefArabic NLPArabic Language Models

    Independent Researchers

  9. Large Language Models Persuade Without Planning Theory of Mind

    Feb 19, 2026Jared Moore, Rasmus Overmark, Ned Cooper +3Theory of MindPersuasion in Language Models

    Department of Computer Science, Stanford University · School of Philosophical, Anthropological and Film Studies, School of Psychology and Neuroscience, University of St. Andrews · Department of Information Science, Cornell University +3

  10. Language Statistics and False Belief Reasoning: Evidence from 41 Open-Weight LMs

    Feb 17, 2026Sean Trott, Samuel Taylor, Cameron Jones +2Theory of MindPragmatic Reasoning in Language Models

    Rutgers University - Newark · UC San Diego · Stony Brook University +1

  11. BASIS: Evaluating Belief-Aware Solutions in Interactive Settings beyond Instructions

    Feb 14, 2026Minyuan Ruan, Ziyue Wang, Kaiming Liu +3LLM Agent EvaluationAI Agent Benchmarks

    Dept. of Comp. Sci. & Tech., Institute for AI, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China · Institute for AI Industry Research (AIR), Tsinghua University, Beijing, China

  12. Representational Similarity Alignment of Figurative Language in Humans and Large Language Models

    Jan 14, 2026Samhita Bollepally, Aurora Sloman-Moll, Takashi Yamauchi +1Figurative Language UnderstandingLLM Evaluation

  13. PRiME: Pragmatic Reasoning In MEntal health

    Jul 31, 2025Sneha Oram, Tejomay Kishor Padole, Pushpak Bhattacharyya +1Language Model Reasoning EvaluationPragmatic Reasoning in Language Models

    Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay