Do LLMs fail in bridging generation?

Natalia Skachkova, Simon Ostermann, Josef van Genabith, and Bernd Kiefer found that large language models mostly fail to generate bridging relations reliably, according to a study published in the Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics, Vol. 38 No. 2, pages 77–95, in July 2025. The authors ran two tasks — generating texts containing bridging and filling in missing bridging spans — and reported that in most cases the models could not use bridging knowledge effectively.

Abstract In this work we investigate whether large language models LLMs ‘understand’ bridging relations and can use this knowledge effectively. We present the results obtained from two tasks: generation of texts containing bridging and filling in missing bridging spans. We show that in most of the cases LLMs fail to generate bridging in a reliable way. - Anthology ID: - 2025.jlcl-2.5 - Volume: - Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics, Vol. 38 No. 2: LLM Fails - Failed experiments with generative AI and what we can learn from them https://aclanthology.org/volumes/2025.jlcl-2/ - Month: - July - Year: - 2025 - Address: - Editors: - Ngoc Duyen Tanja Tu https://aclanthology.org/people/ngoc-duyen-tanja-tu/unverified/ , Annelen Brunner https://aclanthology.org/people/annelen-brunner/unverified/ , Christian Lang https://aclanthology.org/people/christian-lang/unverified/ - Venue: - JLCL https://aclanthology.org/venues/jlcl/ - SIG: - Publisher: - German Society for Computational Linguistics and Language Technology - Note: - Pages: - 77–95 - Language: - URL: - https://aclanthology.org/2025.jlcl-2.5/ https://aclanthology.org/2025.jlcl-2.5/ - DOI: - 10.21248/jlcl.38.2025.286 https://doi.org/10.21248/jlcl.38.2025.286 - Cite ACL : - Natalia Skachkova, Simon Ostermann, Josef van Genabith, and Bernd Kiefer. 2025. Do LLMs fail in bridging generation? https://aclanthology.org/2025.jlcl-2.5/ . Journal for Language Technology and Computational Linguistics , 38 2 :77–95. - Cite Informal : - Do LLMs fail in bridging generation? https://aclanthology.org/2025.jlcl-2.5/ Skachkova et al., JLCL 2025 - PDF: - https://aclanthology.org/2025.jlcl-2.5.pdf https://aclanthology.org/2025.jlcl-2.5.pdf