Pith Number

pith:VEH5UWC6

pith:2026:VEH5UWC6AZYXWPFKHB55FIIQWV

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Why are language models less surprised than humans? Testing the Parse Multiplicity Mismatch Hypothesis

Brian Dillon, Tal Linzen, William Timkey

Reducing the number of simultaneous parses in language models increases predicted garden path effects but not enough to match human reading difficulties.

arxiv:2605.15440 v1 · 2026-05-14 · cs.CL

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The bundle contains the canonical record plus signed events. A mirror can host it anywhere and recompute the same current state with the deterministic merge algorithm.

Claims

C1strongest claim

Reducing the number of simultaneous active parses indeed increases the magnitude of predicted garden path effects, but not nearly enough to capture the full magnitude of the effects in humans.

C2weakest assumption

That word-synchronous beam search in RNNGs with a controllable beam size provides a faithful proxy for the number of distinct sentence interpretations a human parser can maintain in parallel (section on methods and results).

C3one line summary

Varying the number of simultaneous parses in RNNGs increases predicted garden-path effects but does not fully reconcile LM surprisal with human reading times.

References

299 extracted · 299 resolved · 2 Pith anchors

[1] Marr, David , month = may, year =. Vision:

[2] Lowerre, B. T. , month = apr, year =. The

[3] Lewis, Richard L. , editor =. Specifying. Architectures and. 1999 , pages =. doi:10.1017/CBO9780511527210.004 , abstract = 1999 · doi:10.1017/cbo9780511527210.004

[4] and Tanenhaus, Michael K

[5] Constraint-based models of sentence processing , isbn =

Formal links

1 machine-checked theorem link

Receipt and verification

First computed	2026-05-20T00:00:58.672446Z
Builder	pith-number-builder-2026-05-17-v1
Signature	Pith Ed25519 (`pith-v1-2026-05`) · public key
Schema	pith-number/v1.0

Canonical hash

a90fda585e06717b3caa387bd2a110b579d75dcc46fb86728b06407dc5d15cc5

Aliases

arxiv: 2605.15440 · arxiv_version: 2605.15440v1 · doi: 10.48550/arxiv.2605.15440 · pith_short_12: VEH5UWC6AZYX · pith_short_16: VEH5UWC6AZYXWPFK · pith_short_8: VEH5UWC6

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Verify this Pith Number yourself

curl -sH 'Accept: application/ld+json' https://pith.science/pith/VEH5UWC6AZYXWPFKHB55FIIQWV \
  | jq -c '.canonical_record' \
  | python3 -c "import sys,json,hashlib; b=json.dumps(json.loads(sys.stdin.read()), sort_keys=True, separators=(',',':'), ensure_ascii=False).encode(); print(hashlib.sha256(b).hexdigest())"
# expect: a90fda585e06717b3caa387bd2a110b579d75dcc46fb86728b06407dc5d15cc5

Canonical record JSON

{
  "metadata": {
    "abstract_canon_sha256": "aa038da97d8ee8e0569cb058715aad053020e327d658c3ad6505862823d22575",
    "cross_cats_sorted": [],
    "license": "http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/",
    "primary_cat": "cs.CL",
    "submitted_at": "2026-05-14T21:44:26Z",
    "title_canon_sha256": "164ba0f468b1cc8e9a35dc7629451a19dfcb5457957a3fc03856cd45488c6856"
  },
  "schema_version": "1.0",
  "source": {
    "id": "2605.15440",
    "kind": "arxiv",
    "version": 1
  }
}