Can Large Language Models Understand Context?

Apple Machine Learning Journal / 4/21/2026

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Key Points

  • The paper examines whether large language models (LLMs) truly understand linguistic context, despite increasing evidence of broad language ability.
  • It introduces a new “context understanding” benchmark tailored specifically for evaluating generative models’ ability to capture contextual features.
  • The benchmark is constructed by adapting existing datasets and organizes evaluation into four distinct tasks across nine datasets.
  • The work highlights that context-aware linguistic capability has received less systematic probing than other NLP evaluation areas.
  • (From the excerpt) The benchmark aims to fill this gap by providing a structured evaluation framework focused on contextual understanding.
Understanding context is key to understanding human language, an ability which Large Language Models (LLMs) have been increasingly seen to demonstrate to an impressive extent. However, though the evaluation of LLMs encompasses various domains within the realm of Natural Language Processing, limited attention has been paid to probing their linguistic capability of understanding contextual features. This paper introduces a context understanding benchmark by adapting existing datasets to suit the evaluation of generative models. This benchmark comprises of four distinct tasks and nine datasets…

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