Hey, guess what: CUES lead to inferences about typicality

Overview & Synopsis

Throughout life, we accumulate knowledge of how typical certain events are. We use this knowledge in daily conversation, often interpreting meaning beyond what has been said explicitly. In this work, we take steps to better understand this meaning recovery, investigating both atypicality and typicality inferences. First, we construct two corpora, EventTyp and the human-validated EventTypGold. We conduct large-scale human and LLM experiments and find that for humans, three CUES predict inferences about typicality: Commonsense Knowledge, Utterance Emphasis, and Snark. However, in most experimental settings, we find that LLMs lack the prerequisite Commonsense Knowledge necessary to accurately assess an event's general typicality, and therefore struggle to follow these CUES.