Evaluating Theory of (an uncertain) Mind: Predicting the Uncertain Beliefs of Others in Conversation Forecasting

2024/09/23 by Anthony Sicilia, Sicilia, Anthony, Malihe Alikhani +1
Decision Sciences · #Artificial Intelligence (cs.AI) #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Forecasting Techniques and Applications

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.14986

openalex publication_date 2024/09/23 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Typically, when evaluating Theory of Mind, we consider the beliefs of others to be binary: held or not held. But what if someone is unsure about their own beliefs? How can we quantify this uncertainty? We propose a new suite of tasks, challenging language models (LMs) to model the uncertainty of others in dialogue. We design these tasks around conversation forecasting, wherein an agent forecasts an unobserved outcome to a conversation. Uniquely, we view interlocutors themselves as forecasters, asking an LM to predict the uncertainty of the interlocutors (a probability). We experiment with re-scaling methods, variance reduction strategies, and demographic context, for this regression task, conducting experiments on three dialogue corpora (social, negotiation, task-oriented) with eight LMs. While LMs can explain up to 7% variance in the uncertainty of others, we highlight the difficulty of the tasks and room for future work, especially in practical applications, like anticipating ``false

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