Despite increasingly fluent, relevant, and coherent language generation, major gaps remain between how humans and machines use language. We argue that a key dimension that is missing from our understanding of language models (LMs) is the model's ability to interpret and generate expressions of uncertainty. Whether it be the weatherperson announcing a chance of rain or a doctor giving a diagnosis, information is often not black-and-white and expressions of uncertainty provide nuance to support human-decision making. The increasing deployment of LMs in the wild motivates us to investigate whether LMs are capable of interpreting expressions of uncertainty and how LMs' behaviors change when learning to emit their own expressions of uncertainty. When injecting expressions of uncertainty into prompts (e.g., "I think the answer is..."), we discover that GPT3's generations vary upwards of 80% in accuracy based on the expression used. We analyze the linguistic characteristics of these expressions and find a drop in accuracy when naturalistic expressions of certainty are present. We find similar effects when teaching models to emit their own expressions of uncertainty, where model calibration suffers when teaching models to emit certainty rather than uncertainty. Together, these results highlight the challenges of building LMs that interpret and generate trustworthy expressions of uncertainty.

本文探究了语言模型在解释和生成不确定表达时的行为，并发现当模型以确定性的语言输出时，模型的准确性会有所下降。这些结果突显了建立有能力解释和生成可信任的不确定表达的语言模型的挑战。

驾驭灰色地带：语言模型中的过度自信和不确定表达