Retai, Where Technology Meets Perspective Real talk about software, hardware, and the messy reality of building things that work. Browse Latest Posts We write about the technical side of technology, not just the shiny product launches and sanitized press releases. You’ll find posts about architecture decisions, engineering tradeoffs, and the culture that actually determines what …
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Why Discourse Coherence Remains the Hardest Problem in NLP: Narrative Structure as a Diagnostic for What Transformers Lack
Why Discourse Coherence Remains the Hardest Problem in NLP: Narrative Structure as a Diagnostic for What Transformers Lack Read the following continuation of a short narrative prompt. Nothing is obviously broken at the sentence level — the grammar is clean, the register holds, the transitions read smoothly if you only look at adjacent sentences: Prompt: …
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How Language Models Handle Ambiguity and Why It Matters
Ambiguity is a property of natural language in which a single surface form can correspond to multiple underlying structures or meanings. In morphosyntactic terms, this includes lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity, and scope ambiguity. For transformer language models, ambiguity is not a peripheral edge case; it is a central test of whether a model has acquired …
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The Relationship Between Grammar and Meaning in Neural Networks
Grammar and meaning are usually treated as separate layers of language. One is a system of formal rules; the other is a network of concepts and referents. In transformer language models, that separation gets harder to hold onto. A model that predicts the next token has to learn something about agreement, word order, and argument …
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Why Narrative Coherence in Language Models Is Not Story Understanding
Ask a language model to write a short story. You will get something that reads like one. A protagonist, a conflict, a turning point, a resolution. Grammatical prose. Emotional shifts at the moments you would expect. Skim it and you might not notice anything wrong. That is exactly the problem. What looks like storytelling is, …
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Why Alignment Research Needs Philosophical Rigor
Alignment research is the study of how to make the goals of an artificial system match the goals of its designers and users. It sits at the intersection of technical specification, behavioral testing, and normative judgment. Adjacent concepts include value specification, reward modeling, interpretability, and robustness. For a blog that examines where language models fail …
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