I believe I have read a paper about superhuman performance of LSTM LMs maybe 4 years ago. The fact that LMs are better than humans is not that surprising. With the amount of data they have seen, even relatively simple models are able to precisely calculate the probabilities for individual words. But the comparison to humans does not make much sense here. People are not really doing language modeling in their day-to-day communication. When we speak, we are not predicting what will be our next word, we are communicating ideas and selecting words that will represent these ideas. When we hear someone speaking, we are using context clues to understand their language, we are not making the predictions based solely on the words that are being said in that moment. When thinking about language, we are not sorting all the words from the vocabulary in our heads, we are usually selecting the one word that fits our needs the best. Language modeling as used in computer science today is completely unnatural to human thinking and useless in communication.
I believe I have read a paper about superhuman performance of LSTM LMs maybe 4 years ago. The fact that LMs are better than humans is not that surprising. With the amount of data they have seen, even relatively simple models are able to precisely calculate the probabilities for individual words. But the comparison to humans does not make much sense here. People are not really doing language modeling in their day-to-day communication. When we speak, we are not predicting what will be our next word, we are communicating ideas and selecting words that will represent these ideas. When we hear someone speaking, we are using context clues to understand their language, we are not making the predictions based solely on the words that are being said in that moment. When thinking about language, we are not sorting all the words from the vocabulary in our heads, we are usually selecting the one word that fits our needs the best. Language modeling as used in computer science today is completely unnatural to human thinking and useless in communication.