arXiv subjects

Daniel W. Linna Jr.

Publications and source records attributed to Daniel W. Linna Jr..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

SMART: A Social Movement Analysis & Reasoning Tool with Case Studies on #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter

Social movements supporting the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) play a vital role in improving human lives. If journalists were aware of the relationship between social movements and external events, they could provide more precise, time-sensitive reporting about movement issues and SDGs. Our SMART system achieves this goal by collecting data from multiple sources, extracting emotions on various themes, and then using a transformer-based forecasting engine (DEEP) to predict quantity and intensity of emotions in future posts. This paper demonstrates SMART's Retrospective capabilities required by journalists via case studies analyzing social media discussions of the #MeToo and #BlackLivesMatter before and after the 2024 U.S. election. We create a novel 1-year dataset which we will release upon publication. It contains over 2.7M Reddit posts and over 1M news articles. We show that SMART enables early detection of discourse shifts around key political events, providing journalists with actionable insights to inform editorial planning. SMART was developed through multiple interactions with a panel of over 20 journalists from a variety of news organizations over a 2-year period, including an author of this paper.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2026

OpenExempt: A Diagnostic Benchmark for Legal Reasoning and a Framework for Creating Custom Benchmarks on Demand

Reasoning benchmarks have played a crucial role in the progress of language models. Yet rigorous evaluation remains a significant challenge as static question-answer pairs provide only a snapshot of performance, compressing complex behavior into a single accuracy metric. This limitation is especially true in complex, rule-bound domains such as law, where existing benchmarks are costly to build and ill suited for isolating specific failure modes. To address this, we introduce OpenExempt, a framework and benchmark for diagnostic evaluation of legal reasoning. The OpenExempt Framework uses expert-crafted symbolic representations of U.S. Bankruptcy Code statutes to dynamically generate a large space of natural language reasoning tasks and their machine-computable solutions on demand. This gives users fine-grained control over task complexity and scope, allowing individual reasoning skills to be probed in isolation. Using this system, we construct the OpenExempt Benchmark, a diagnostic benchmark for legal reasoning with 9,765 samples across nine evaluation suites designed to carefully probe model capabilities. Experiments on 13 diverse language models reveal sharp performance cliffs that emerge only under longer reasoning paths and in the presence of obfuscating statements. We release the framework and benchmark publicly to support research aimed at understanding and improving the next generation of reasoning systems.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

DEEP: A Discourse Evolution Engine for Predictions about Social Movements

Numerous social movements (SMs) around the world help support the UN's Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). Understanding how key events shape SMs is key to the achievement of the SDGs. We have developed SMART (Social Media Analysis & Reasoning Tool) to track social movements related to the SDGs. SMART was designed by a multidisciplinary team of AI researchers, journalists, communications scholars and legal experts. This paper describes SMART's transformer-based multivariate time series Discourse Evolution Engine for Predictions about Social Movements (DEEP) to predict the volume of future articles/posts and the emotions expressed. DEEP outputs probabilistic forecasts with uncertainty estimates, providing critical support for editorial planning and strategic decision-making. We evaluate DEEP with a case study of the #MeToo movement by creating a novel longitudinal dataset (433K Reddit posts and 121K news articles) from September 2024 to June 2025 that will be publicly released for research purposes upon publication of this paper.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2022

Algorithmic Learning Foundations for Common Law

This paper looks at a common law legal system as a learning algorithm, models specific features of legal proceedings, and asks whether this system learns efficiently. A particular feature of our model is explicitly viewing various aspects of court proceedings as learning algorithms. This viewpoint enables directly pointing out that when the costs of going to court are not commensurate with the benefits of going to court, there is a failure of learning and inaccurate outcomes will persist in cases that settle. Specifically, cases are brought to court at an insufficient rate. On the other hand, when individuals can be compelled or incentivized to bring their cases to court, the system can learn and inaccuracy vanishes over time.

cs.CY↗