Lexical Redefinition Reveals Context-Sensitive Instruction Following

Abstract:How do language models reconcile conflicting contextual evidence within a prompt? We study this question using lexical redefinition, where an explicit instruction specifies how a word should be interpreted and a subsequent sentence provides additional evidence through its usage. Across 870 word pairs, we find that lexical redefinitions are not applied as fixed rules. Instead, the behaviour depends systematically on the relationship between the explicit instruction and the intervening sentence: the contextualised usage can preserve, weaken, or completely reverse the instruction. These results suggest that the interpretation of an explicit instruction remains sensitive to subsequent contextual evidence. Lexical redefinition therefore provides a controlled behavioural paradigm for studying how language models integrate multiple sources of information within a prompt.

Computation and Language (cs.CL)

arXiv:2610.16952 [cs.CL]

(or arXiv:2610.16952v1 [cs.CL] for this version)

https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2610.16952 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)

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