What's in a Name? Morphological Shortcuts by LLMs in Pharmacology
The morphological form of a word can often give cues to its meaning, but purely relying on these mappings can lead to overgeneralization in high-stakes domains. In the medical domain, for instance, LLMs can confidently reason about fictitious drugs from their affixes alone (e.g., wugcillin) and generate plausible-looking clinical content. We present a behavioral and mechanistic study of LLM "affix heuristics" in pharmacology. Using fictitious drug names built from real affixes, we show that affix signals alone elicit class-level pharmacological responses. We introduce a framework for identifying whether a model's drug semantics are driven mainly by the affix, the stem, or the drug name as...
| Authors | Kaijie Mo, Thomas Yang, Chantal Shaib et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 4 June 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 2 September 2026 |
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