Comment by D-Machine
3 days ago
Ah, but cats won't just comfortably sit on a mat if they feel there is danger. They will only sit on a mat if they feel comfortable! Absent larger context, the sentence is in fact ambiguous (though I agree your reading is the most natural and obvious one).
But do we usually describe cats as comfortable, as in their feelings? We might say he IS comfortable, or he feels comfort, but for something to be "comfortable" that implies it gives comfort to others. I can see a cat being comfortable to a human, in that a cat gives comfort to a human. But I wouldn't say "The cat is comfortable, therefore he laid on a mat." Its almost a garden path sentence, I would expect "The cat is comfortable, that's why I let him lay on me".
In literary and casual contexts, absolutely (though we'd probably say "he/she" instead of "it" here). As I said, "it" referring to the mat is the most natural and obvious reading, but other ones are perfectly logical and sound, if less likely/common.
Although the sentence is itself a bit awkward and strange on its own, and really needs context. In fact, this is because the sentence is generated as a short example to make a point about attention and tokens, and is not really something someone would utter naturally in isolation.
I mostly just wanted to playfully comment that original GP / top-level comment had a valid point about the ambiguity!
> Although the sentence is itself a bit awkward and strange on its own, and really needs context.
Absolutely, but in this case and in many others we just don't have that kind of context. So we do what comes naturally and make assumptions based on past experience. We assume that the most frequently encountered form of it is the right one. From one perspective it can be said that LLM's are doing the same.
It's interesting to note that jokes are absolutely riddled with confusing and syntactically vague language like this. If you're ever looking for a good NLP test find some children's joke books. Those old dad jokes are mostly just about the vagaries of the English language and how easily you can be surprised when the "solution" to a sentence is not the most common one.