surprisal is Not a Theory

arXiv:2607.20208 · cs.CL · Submitted 2026-07-22 · Read on arXiv

cs.CL

Submitted: 2026-07-22

Updated: 2026-09-15

Project page: https://osf.io/n8kb3/overview

License: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

The gist: Surprisal Theory is often characterized as a computational-level explanation per (Marr, 1982).

Terminology

Abstract

Surprisal Theory is often characterized as a computational-level explanation per (Marr, 1982). We argue in this work that, even though a computational level narrative has been used to support "representation-agnostic research" within computational psycholinguistics, the movement toward black box systems embodied by large language models (LLMs) does not exempt modelers using the surprisal metric from the representational decisions required by computational-level characterizations. In fact, we argue that the uncritical use of LLM-surprisal obfuscates the representational and algorithmic-level commitments of different models. In three analyses, we show that the choice of algorithm and model architecture play significant roles in the computation of language model probabilities. We advise that researchers who wish to test Surprisal Theory re-evaluate the practice of treating large language model probabilities as interchangeable

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