Sheng Li

You Shouldn't Have Asked: A Pragmatics-Inspired Taxonomy for Evaluating LLM Refusals

This work proposes the first taxonomy of LLM refusals that is grounded in pragmatic theory and finds that although models differ in how they refuse, their refusals are overall explicit and strongly morally evaluative, with interactional repair occurring mainly through offering or providing safer alternatives instead of interpersonal facework.