Shramay Palta, Peter A. Rankel University of Maryland, College Park, Sarah Wiegreffe University of Maryland, College Park, Rachel Rudinger
We investigate the degree to which human (and LLM) plausibility judgments of multiple-choice commonsense benchmark answers are subject to influence by (im)plausibility arguments for or against an answer, in particular, using rationales generated by LLMs. We collect 3,000 plausibility judgments from humans and another 13,600 judgments from LLMs. Overall, we observe increases and decreases in mean human plausibility ratings in the presence of LLM-generated PRO and CON rationales, respectively, suggesting that, on the whole, human judges find these rationales convincing. Experiments with LLMs reveal similar patterns of influence. Our findings demonstrate a novel use of LLMs for studying aspects of human cognition, while also raising practical concerns that, even in domains where humans are “experts” (i.e., common sense), LLMs have the potential to exert considerable influence on people’s beliefs.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Nishant Balepur, Bhavya Rajasekaran, Hyunjin Jane Oh, Michael Xie, Atrey Desai University of Maryland, College Park and University of Texas at Arlington, Vipul Gupta Scale AI, Steven James Moore George Mason University, Eunsol Choi New York University 等 10 位作者
Multiple-choice question answering (MCQA) is standard in NLP, but benchmarks lack rigorous quality control. We present BenchMarker, an education-inspired toolkit using LLM judges to flag three common MCQ flaws: 1) contamination—items appearing exactly online; 2) shortcuts—cues in the choices that enable guessing; and 3) writing errors—structural/grammatical issues based on a 19-rule education rubric. We validate BenchMarker with human annotations, then run the tool to audit 12 benchmarks, revealing: 2) contaminated MCQs tend to inflate accuracy, while writing errors tend to lower it and change rankings beyond random; and 3) prior benchmark repairs address their targeted issues (i.e., lowering accuracy with LLM-written distractors), but inadvertently add new flaws (i.e. implausible distractors, many correct answers). Overall, flaws in MCQs degrade NLP evaluation, but education research offers a path forward. We release BenchMarker to bridge the fields and improve MCQA benchmark design.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表
Nishant Balepur, Atrey Desai University of Maryland, College Park and University of Texas at Arlington, Rachel Rudinger
Large language models (LLMs) now give reasoning before answering, excelling in tasks like multiple-choice question answering (MCQA). Yet, a concern is that LLMs do not solve MCQs as intended, as work finds LLMs sans reasoning succeed in MCQA without using the question, i.e., choices-only. Such partial-input success is often deemed problematic, but reasoning traces could reveal if these strategies are truly shallow in choices-only settings. To study these strategies, reasoning LLMs solve MCQs in full and choices-only inputs; test-time reasoning often boosts accuracy on full and in choices-only half the time. While possibly due to shallow shortcuts, choices-only success is barely affected by the length of reasoning traces, and after finding traces pass faithfulness tests, we show they use less problematic strategies like inferring missing questions. In all, we challenge claims that partial-input success is always a flaw, so we discuss how reasoning traces could separate problematic data from less problematic reasoning.
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cs.CL
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers) · 2026 · 正式发表