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arXiv · 2604.12018

LLMs Struggle with Abstract Meaning Comprehension More Than Expected

Hamoud Alhazmi·Jiachen Jiang
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Abstract

Understanding abstract meanings is crucial for advanced language comprehension. Despite extensive research, abstract words remain challenging due to their non-concrete, high-level semantics. SemEval-2021 Task 4 (ReCAM) evaluates models' ability to interpret abstract concepts by presenting passages with questions and five abstract options in a cloze-style format. Key findings include: (1) Most large language models (LLMs), including GPT-4o, struggle with abstract meaning comprehension under zero-shot, one-shot, and few-shot settings, while fine-tuned models like BERT and RoBERTa perform better. (2) A proposed bidirectional attention classifier, inspired by human cognitive strategies, enhances fine-tuned models by dynamically attending to passages and options. This approach improves accuracy by 4.06 percent on Task 1 and 3.41 percent on Task 2, demonstrating its potential for abstract meaning comprehension.

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Hamoud Alhazmi, Jiachen Jiang. 2026-04-13. LLMs Struggle with Abstract Meaning Comprehension More Than Expected. https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.12018

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