surprisal is Not a Theory
Surprisal Theory is often characterized as a computational-level explanation per (Marr, 1982). We argue in this work that, even though a computational level narrative has been used to support "representation-agnostic research" within computational psycholinguistics, the movement toward black box systems embodied by large language models (LLMs) does not exempt modelers using the surprisal metric from the representational decisions required by computational-level characterizations. In fact, we argue that the uncritical use of LLM-surprisal obfuscates the representational and algorithmic-level commitments of different models. In three analyses, we show that the choice of algorithm and model ...
| Authors | Andrés Buxó-Lugo, Aniello De Santo, Morgan Grobol et al. |
|---|---|
| Primary category | cs.CL |
| Published | 22 July 2026 |
| Last updated at source | 15 September 2026 |
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