arXiv subjects

Jasmine Mangat

Publications and source records attributed to Jasmine Mangat.

5 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Detecting and Enhancing Intellectual Humility in Online Political Discourse

Intellectual humility (IH)-a recognition of one's own intellectual limitations-can reduce polarization and foster more understanding across lines of difference. Yet little work explores how IH can be systematically defined, measured, evaluated, and enhanced in spaces that often lack it the most: online political discussions. In this paper, we seek to bridge these gaps by exploring two questions: 1) how might preexisting levels of IH influence future expressions of IH during online political discourse? and 2) can online interventions enhance IH across different political topics and conversational environments? To pursue these questions, we define a codebook characterizing different dimensions of IH and intellectual arrogance (IA) and have researchers use it to annotate several hundred Reddit posts, which we then use to develop and validate a classifier to support IH analysis at scale. These tools subsequently enable two key contributions: i) an observational data analysis of how IH varies across different political discussions on Reddit, which reveals that more/less IH environments tend to contain future posts of a similar nature, and ii) a randomized control trial evaluating strategies for nudging discussion participants to demonstrate more IH in their posts, which reveals the possibility of enhancing IH in online discussions across a range of contentious topics. Our findings highlight the possibility of measuring and increasing IH online without necessarily reducing engagement.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2025

Human-AI Narrative Synthesis to Foster Shared Understanding in Civic Decision-Making

Community engagement processes in representative political contexts, like school districts, generate massive volumes of feedback that overwhelm traditional synthesis methods, creating barriers to shared understanding not only between civic leaders and constituents but also among community members. To address these barriers, we developed StoryBuilder, a human-AI collaborative pipeline that transforms community input into accessible first-person narratives. Using 2,480 community responses from an ongoing school rezoning process, we generated 124 composite stories and deployed them through a mobile-friendly StorySharer interface. Our mixed-methods evaluation combined a four-month field deployment, user studies with 21 community members, and a controlled experiment examining how narrative composition affects participant reactions. Field results demonstrate that narratives helped community members relate across diverse perspectives. In the experiment, experience-grounded narratives generated greater respect and trust than opinion-heavy narratives. We contribute a human-AI narrative synthesis system and insights on its varied acceptance and effectiveness in a real-world civic context.

cs.HC↗

arXiv2025

A community-driven optimization framework for redrawing school attendance boundaries

The vast majority of US public school districts use school attendance boundaries to determine which student addresses are assigned to which schools. Existing work shows how redrawing boundaries can be a powerful policy lever for increasing access and opportunity for historically disadvantaged groups, even while maintaining other priorities like minimizing driving distances and preserving existing social ties between students and families. This study introduces a multi-objective algorithmic school rezoning framework and applies it to a large-scale rezoning effort impacting over 50,000 students through an ongoing researcher-school district partnership. The framework is designed to incorporate feedback from community members and policymakers, both by deciding which goals are optimized and also by placing differential ``importance'' on goals through weights from community surveys. Empirical results reveal the framework's ability to surface school redistricting plans that simultaneously advance a number of objectives often thought to be in competition with one another, including socioeconomic integration, transportation efficiency, and stable feeder patterns (transitions) between elementary, middle, and high schools. The paper also highlights how local education policymakers navigate several practical challenges, like building political will to make change in a polarized policy climate. The framework is built using open-source tools and publicly released to support school districts in exploring and implementing new policies to improve educational access and opportunity in the coming years.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2024

Contextual Stochastic Optimization for School Desegregation Policymaking

Most US school districts draw geographic "attendance zones" to assign children to schools based on their home address, a process that can replicate existing neighborhood racial/ethnic and socioeconomic status (SES) segregation in schools. Redrawing boundaries can reduce segregation, but estimating expected rezoning impacts is often challenging because families can opt-out of their assigned schools. This paper seeks to alleviate this societal problem by developing a joint redistricting and choice modeling framework, called Redistricting with Choices (RWC). The RWC framework is applied to a large US public school district to estimate how redrawing elementary school boundaries might realistically impact levels of socioeconomic segregation. The main methodological contribution of RWC is a contextual stochastic optimization model that aims to minimize district-wide segregation by integrating rezoning constraints with a machine learning-based school choice model. The study finds that RWC yields boundary changes that might reduce segregation by a substantial amount (23%) -- but doing so might require the re-assignment of a large number of students, likely to mitigate re-segregation that choice patterns could exacerbate. The results also reveal that predicting school choice is a challenging machine learning problem. Overall, this study offers a novel practical framework that both academics and policymakers might use to foster more diverse and integrated schools.

cs.CY↗

arXiv2023

Here Be Livestreams: Trade-offs in Creating Temporal Maps of Reddit

We present a method for mapping Reddit communities that accounts for temporal shifts, using quantitative and qualitative analyses of clustering techniques to produce high-quality, stable, and meaningful maps for researchers, journalists and casual Reddit users. Building on previous work using community embeddings, we find that only a month of Reddit comments suffices to create snapshot embeddings that maintain quality while supporting insight into changes in Reddit communities over time. Comparing different clusterings of community embeddings with quantitative measures of quality and temporal stability, we describe properties of the models and what they tell us about the underlying Reddit data. Moreover, qualitative analysis of the resulting clusters illuminate which properties of clusterings are useful for analysis of Reddit communities. Although clusterings of subreddits have been used in many earlier works, we believe this is the first study to qualitatively analyze how these clusterings are perceived by social media researchers at a Reddit-wide scale. Finally, we demonstrate how the temporal snapshots might be used in exploratory study. We are able to identify particularly stable communities during 2021-2022, such as the Reddit Public Access Network, as well as emerging communities, like one focused on NFT trading. This work informed the development of a webtool for exploring Reddit now available to the public at RedditMap.social.

cs.SI↗