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This whole topic is incredibly misunderstood by the entire industry: There are two common ways to understand questions like "how many r's are in strawberry" 1

This whole topic is incredibly misunderstood by the entire industry: There are two common ways to understand questions like "how many r's are in strawberry" 1- How many total r's in the word 2- How many r's in a particular subword/syllable (here "berry"), the implied question being "1 or 2?"; This is often what is meant in human conversation! When LLMs answer "2", they are not wrong, they're simply interpreting it as the second way above, because that's more commonly what is meant in real conversations!! I can't believe that I seem to be the only one who sees this. Edit: I just asked it, look which r's it highlighted!! https://chatgpt.com/share/66e446cb-822c-8000-94fd-72d749ceb910 https://chatgpt.com/share/66e446cb-822c-8000-94fd-72d749ceb9...

gilleain 2y ago
How many s's are in Mississipi?
- jdthedisciple 2y ago
  Nice rare counterexample, proving the rule I laid out. How many l's are in diligent? The most common instances of such questions revolve simply around 1 vs 2, it doesnt even matter if there are 0 or more of the letter in the rest of the word!
JamesSwift 2y ago
Ive never observed the 2nd scenario and cant imagine that would ever be what someone thought was meant. I have to ask… is this sarcasm? Because Im genuinely confused
- jdthedisciple 2y ago
  Nope it's not sarcasm. Think about it: Most instances of such questions are about r vs rr, l vs ll, s vs ss, etc. when people actually ask them. It's a simple yet overlooked fact.
  - JamesSwift 2y ago
    OK, I understand now. Im not sure I've seen the form you put it in, but I agree its very common for someone to say something to the effect of "Is it 1 r or 2 in strawberry", completely eliding the first r. That makes more sense. I still disagree the posted form gets interpreted as that though : D
    - jdthedisciple 2y ago
      Glad you see what I mean now :) Any particular reason you disagree? It's a more plausible explanation than "llm dumb lol" in my view, given its statistical nature
      - JamesSwift 2y ago
        Just the nuance of the language. Im saying _statistically_ those scenarios are "Im currently trying to spell a word and Im verbally asking you which is right". Very rarely would that be written in text, and I think its much more likely to be framed as "is there 1 or 2" as the question. I think _statistically_ it is overwhelmingly likely the question as framed is a trivia style question asking for the actual answer.
        jdthedisciple 2y ago
        Statistically I would surmise it's more often asked with a 1 vs 2 framing, because I don't think anyone genuinely was ever asked by another person how many of any character are in any correctly spelled word in written form, because that would be a redundant question, right? But I suppose to answer this it could help to actually gather statistics on the frequency of either version in texts online.
jdthedisciple 2y ago
Sad to see this genuine argument being downvoted simply because people can't handle the fact they missed it, lol
Ukv 2y ago
LLMs perform poorly at tasks that require considering words as their component letters because they only see tokens. "strawberry" is split as [str][aw][berry] and becomes [496, 675, 15717]. To some degree they can learn from data what letters are in which tokens, but it's not direct like it is for us. > There are two common ways to understand questions like "how many r's are in strawberry" [...] > 2- How many r's in a particular subword/syllable (here "berry") This seems a strange interpretation - why is "straw" ignored?
- jdthedisciple 2y ago
  You never been in a conversation where someone asks "is it 1 or 2 r in strawberry?", ignoring certain single instances of the same in other parts of the word? Think about it- as I said below, usually it's about things like s vs ss, r vs rr, l vs ll etc
  - Ukv 2y ago
    Ah so you think it's interpreting it as "is the second r-sound a single or double r?" But, even with that interpetation, I don't think it really explains the errors. Like just now I asked how many i's were in "disabilities": https://i.imgur.com/TZFByen.png https://i.imgur.com/TZFByen.png - it gives the wrong answer and there's no double-i in disabilities to be causing the ambiguity. The follow-on reveals that it generally struggles working with individual letters. Or, taking a word that is ambigious in this way and adding another of the letter to it to show that it really is just undercounting: https://i.imgur.com/6PaetPK.png https://i.imgur.com/6PaetPK.png You can also be clear about what you mean and still get the same error: https://i.imgur.com/S0q6vG7.png https://i.imgur.com/S0q6vG7.png
    - jdthedisciple 2y ago
      > Ah so you think it's interpreting it as "is the second r-sound a single or double r?" Right. I agree it fails to actually count the letters, but I still think those two interpretations of the question are valid, so making sure the LLM addresses the intended one should be important. I'm also not sure about the disabilities example: This type of question would be very uncommon I think, not least because there aren't really words with double ii's, and people dont usually ask trivially about the number of characters in a word; rather it's usually about the spelling of a particular syllable (and among those cases, usually 1 vs 2). Your second example is more convincing; however again we must ask: is it understanding the question right? Because you didnt reset the context and so perhaps it based its last answer on its second last answer in a way that could be valid (inside your last screenshot). Idk if that makes sense the way I'm trying to explain what I mean.

gilleain 2y ago

How many s's are in Mississipi?

jdthedisciple 2y ago
Nice rare counterexample, proving the rule I laid out. How many l's are in diligent? The most common instances of such questions revolve simply around 1 vs 2, it doesnt even matter if there are 0 or more of the letter in the rest of the word!

JamesSwift 2y ago

Ive never observed the 2nd scenario and cant imagine that would ever be what someone thought was meant. I have to ask… is this sarcasm? Because Im genuinely confused

jdthedisciple 2y ago
Nope it's not sarcasm. Think about it: Most instances of such questions are about r vs rr, l vs ll, s vs ss, etc. when people actually ask them. It's a simple yet overlooked fact.
- JamesSwift 2y ago
  OK, I understand now. Im not sure I've seen the form you put it in, but I agree its very common for someone to say something to the effect of "Is it 1 r or 2 in strawberry", completely eliding the first r. That makes more sense. I still disagree the posted form gets interpreted as that though : D
  - jdthedisciple 2y ago
    Glad you see what I mean now :) Any particular reason you disagree? It's a more plausible explanation than "llm dumb lol" in my view, given its statistical nature
    - JamesSwift 2y ago
      Just the nuance of the language. Im saying _statistically_ those scenarios are "Im currently trying to spell a word and Im verbally asking you which is right". Very rarely would that be written in text, and I think its much more likely to be framed as "is there 1 or 2" as the question. I think _statistically_ it is overwhelmingly likely the question as framed is a trivia style question asking for the actual answer.
      - jdthedisciple 2y ago
        Statistically I would surmise it's more often asked with a 1 vs 2 framing, because I don't think anyone genuinely was ever asked by another person how many of any character are in any correctly spelled word in written form, because that would be a redundant question, right? But I suppose to answer this it could help to actually gather statistics on the frequency of either version in texts online.

jdthedisciple 2y ago

Sad to see this genuine argument being downvoted simply because people can't handle the fact they missed it, lol

Ukv 2y ago

LLMs perform poorly at tasks that require considering words as their component letters because they only see tokens. "strawberry" is split as [str][aw][berry] and becomes [496, 675, 15717]. To some degree they can learn from data what letters are in which tokens, but it's not direct like it is for us. > There are two common ways to understand questions like "how many r's are in strawberry" [...] > 2- How many r's in a particular subword/syllable (here "berry") This seems a strange interpretation - why is "straw" ignored?

jdthedisciple 2y ago
You never been in a conversation where someone asks "is it 1 or 2 r in strawberry?", ignoring certain single instances of the same in other parts of the word? Think about it- as I said below, usually it's about things like s vs ss, r vs rr, l vs ll etc
- Ukv 2y ago
  Ah so you think it's interpreting it as "is the second r-sound a single or double r?" But, even with that interpetation, I don't think it really explains the errors. Like just now I asked how many i's were in "disabilities": https://i.imgur.com/TZFByen.png https://i.imgur.com/TZFByen.png - it gives the wrong answer and there's no double-i in disabilities to be causing the ambiguity. The follow-on reveals that it generally struggles working with individual letters. Or, taking a word that is ambigious in this way and adding another of the letter to it to show that it really is just undercounting: https://i.imgur.com/6PaetPK.png https://i.imgur.com/6PaetPK.png You can also be clear about what you mean and still get the same error: https://i.imgur.com/S0q6vG7.png https://i.imgur.com/S0q6vG7.png
  - jdthedisciple 2y ago
    > Ah so you think it's interpreting it as "is the second r-sound a single or double r?" Right. I agree it fails to actually count the letters, but I still think those two interpretations of the question are valid, so making sure the LLM addresses the intended one should be important. I'm also not sure about the disabilities example: This type of question would be very uncommon I think, not least because there aren't really words with double ii's, and people dont usually ask trivially about the number of characters in a word; rather it's usually about the spelling of a particular syllable (and among those cases, usually 1 vs 2). Your second example is more convincing; however again we must ask: is it understanding the question right? Because you didnt reset the context and so perhaps it based its last answer on its second last answer in a way that could be valid (inside your last screenshot). Idk if that makes sense the way I'm trying to explain what I mean.