arXiv subjects

Kokil Jaidka

Publications and source records attributed to Kokil Jaidka.

36 records · Page 2Linked to original sources

arXiv2025

"Reasoning" with Rhetoric: On the Style-Evidence Tradeoff in LLM-Generated Counter-Arguments

Large language models (LLMs) play a key role in generating evidence-based and stylistic counter-arguments, yet their effectiveness in real-world applications has been underexplored. Previous research often neglects the balance between evidentiality and style, which are crucial for persuasive arguments. To address this, we evaluated the effectiveness of stylized evidence-based counter-argument generation in Counterfire, a new dataset of 38,000 counter-arguments generated by revising counter-arguments to Reddit's ChangeMyView community to follow different discursive styles. We evaluated generic and stylized counter-arguments from basic and fine-tuned models such as GPT-3.5, PaLM-2, and Koala-13B, as well as newer models (GPT-4o, Claude Haiku, LLaMA-3.1) focusing on rhetorical quality and persuasiveness. Our findings reveals that humans prefer stylized counter-arguments over the original outputs, with GPT-3.5 Turbo performing well, though still not reaching human standards of rhetorical quality nor persuasiveness indicating a persisting style-evidence tradeoff in counter-argument generation by LLMs. We conclude with an examination of ethical considerations in LLM persuasion research, addressing potential risks of deceptive practices and the need for transparent deployment methodologies to safeguard against misuse in public discourse. The code and dataset are available at https://github.com/Preetika764/Style_control/.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

On the Limitations of Steering in Language Model Alignment

Steering vectors are a promising approach to aligning language model behavior at inference time. In this paper, we propose a framework to assess the limitations of steering vectors as alignment mechanisms. Using a framework of transformer hook interventions and antonym-based function vectors, we evaluate the role of prompt structure and context complexity in steering effectiveness. Our findings indicate that steering vectors are promising for specific alignment tasks, such as value alignment, but may not provide a robust foundation for general-purpose alignment in LLMs, particularly in complex scenarios. We establish a methodological foundation for future investigations into steering capabilities of reasoning models.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LLMs and Finetuning: Benchmarking cross-domain performance for hate speech detection

In the evolving landscape of online communication, hate speech detection remains a formidable challenge, further compounded by the diversity of digital platforms. This study investigates the effectiveness and adaptability of pre-trained and fine-tuned Large Language Models (LLMs) in identifying hate speech, to address two central questions: (1) To what extent does the model performance depend on the fine-tuning and training parameters?, (2) To what extent do models generalize to cross-domain hate speech detection? and (3) What are the specific features of the datasets or models that influence the generalization potential? The experiment shows that LLMs offer a huge advantage over the state-of-the-art even without pretraining. Ordinary least squares analyses suggest that the advantage of training with fine-grained hate speech labels is washed away with the increase in dataset size. While our research demonstrates the potential of large language models (LLMs) for hate speech detection, several limitations remain, particularly regarding the validity and the reproducibility of the results. We conclude with an exhaustive discussion of the challenges we faced in our experimentation and offer recommended best practices for future scholars designing benchmarking experiments of this kind.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Hateful Meme Detection through Context-Sensitive Prompting and Fine-Grained Labeling

The prevalence of multi-modal content on social media complicates automated moderation strategies. This calls for an enhancement in multi-modal classification and a deeper understanding of understated meanings in images and memes. Although previous efforts have aimed at improving model performance through fine-tuning, few have explored an end-to-end optimization pipeline that accounts for modalities, prompting, labeling, and fine-tuning. In this study, we propose an end-to-end conceptual framework for model optimization in complex tasks. Experiments support the efficacy of this traditional yet novel framework, achieving the highest accuracy and AUROC. Ablation experiments demonstrate that isolated optimizations are not ineffective on their own.

cs.CV↗

arXiv2024

PHAnToM: Persona-based Prompting Has An Effect on Theory-of-Mind Reasoning in Large Language Models

The use of LLMs in natural language reasoning has shown mixed results, sometimes rivaling or even surpassing human performance in simpler classification tasks while struggling with social-cognitive reasoning, a domain where humans naturally excel. These differences have been attributed to many factors, such as variations in prompting and the specific LLMs used. However, no reasons appear conclusive, and no clear mechanisms have been established in prior work. In this study, we empirically evaluate how role-playing prompting influences Theory-of-Mind (ToM) reasoning capabilities. Grounding our rsearch in psychological theory, we propose the mechanism that, beyond the inherent variance in the complexity of reasoning tasks, performance differences arise because of socially-motivated prompting differences. In an era where prompt engineering with role-play is a typical approach to adapt LLMs to new contexts, our research advocates caution as models that adopt specific personas might potentially result in errors in social-cognitive reasoning.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Predicting Sentence-Level Factuality of News and Bias of Media Outlets

Automated news credibility and fact-checking at scale require accurately predicting news factuality and media bias. This paper introduces a large sentence-level dataset, titled "FactNews", composed of 6,191 sentences expertly annotated according to factuality and media bias definitions proposed by AllSides. We use FactNews to assess the overall reliability of news sources, by formulating two text classification problems for predicting sentence-level factuality of news reporting and bias of media outlets. Our experiments demonstrate that biased sentences present a higher number of words compared to factual sentences, besides having a predominance of emotions. Hence, the fine-grained analysis of subjectivity and impartiality of news articles provided promising results for predicting the reliability of media outlets. Finally, due to the severity of fake news and political polarization in Brazil, and the lack of research for Portuguese, both dataset and baseline were proposed for Brazilian Portuguese.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Impact of Decoding Methods on Human Alignment of Conversational LLMs

To be included into chatbot systems, Large language models (LLMs) must be aligned with human conversational conventions. However, being trained mainly on web-scraped data gives existing LLMs a voice closer to informational text than actual human speech. In this paper, we examine the effect of decoding methods on the alignment between LLM-generated and human conversations, including Beam Search, Top K Sampling, and Nucleus Sampling. We present new measures of alignment in substance, style, and psychometric orientation, and experiment with two conversation datasets. Our results provide subtle insights: better alignment is attributed to fewer beams in Beam Search and lower values of P in Nucleus Sampling. We also find that task-oriented and open-ended datasets perform differently in terms of alignment, indicating the significance of taking into account the context of the interaction.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Beyond Text: Leveraging Multi-Task Learning and Cognitive Appraisal Theory for Post-Purchase Intention Analysis

Supervised machine-learning models for predicting user behavior offer a challenging classification problem with lower average prediction performance scores than other text classification tasks. This study evaluates multi-task learning frameworks grounded in Cognitive Appraisal Theory to predict user behavior as a function of users' self-expression and psychological attributes. Our experiments show that users' language and traits improve predictions above and beyond models predicting only from text. Our findings highlight the importance of integrating psychological constructs into NLP to enhance the understanding and prediction of user actions. We close with a discussion of the implications for future applications of large language models for computational psychology.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Turn-Level Empathy Prediction Using Psychological Indicators

For the WASSA 2024 Empathy and Personality Prediction Shared Task, we propose a novel turn-level empathy detection method that decomposes empathy into six psychological indicators: Emotional Language, Perspective-Taking, Sympathy and Compassion, Extroversion, Openness, and Agreeableness. A pipeline of text enrichment using a Large Language Model (LLM) followed by DeBERTA fine-tuning demonstrates a significant improvement in the Pearson Correlation Coefficient and F1 scores for empathy detection, highlighting the effectiveness of our approach. Our system officially ranked 7th at the CONV-turn track.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Thinking Fair and Slow: On the Efficacy of Structured Prompts for Debiasing Language Models

Existing debiasing techniques are typically training-based or require access to the model's internals and output distributions, so they are inaccessible to end-users looking to adapt LLM outputs for their particular needs. In this study, we examine whether structured prompting techniques can offer opportunities for fair text generation. We evaluate a comprehensive end-user-focused iterative framework of debiasing that applies System 2 thinking processes for prompts to induce logical, reflective, and critical text generation, with single, multi-step, instruction, and role-based variants. By systematically evaluating many LLMs across many datasets and different prompting strategies, we show that the more complex System 2-based Implicative Prompts significantly improve over other techniques demonstrating lower mean bias in the outputs with competitive performance on the downstream tasks. Our work offers research directions for the design and the potential of end-user-focused evaluative frameworks for LLM use.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

It Takes Two to Negotiate: Modeling Social Exchange in Online Multiplayer Games

Online games are dynamic environments where players interact with each other, which offers a rich setting for understanding how players negotiate their way through the game to an ultimate victory. This work studies online player interactions during the turn-based strategy game, Diplomacy. We annotated a dataset of over 10,000 chat messages for different negotiation strategies and empirically examined their importance in predicting long- and short-term game outcomes. Although negotiation strategies can be predicted reasonably accurately through the linguistic modeling of the chat messages, more is needed for predicting short-term outcomes such as trustworthiness. On the other hand, they are essential in graph-aware reinforcement learning approaches to predict long-term outcomes, such as a player's success, based on their prior negotiation history. We close with a discussion of the implications and impact of our work. The dataset is available at https://github.com/kj2013/claff-diplomacy.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2023

Just Another Day on Twitter: A Complete 24 Hours of Twitter Data

At the end of October 2022, Elon Musk concluded his acquisition of Twitter. In the weeks and months before that, several questions were publicly discussed that were not only of interest to the platform's future buyers, but also of high relevance to the Computational Social Science research community. For example, how many active users does the platform have? What percentage of accounts on the site are bots? And, what are the dominating topics and sub-topical spheres on the platform? In a globally coordinated effort of 80 scholars to shed light on these questions, and to offer a dataset that will equip other researchers to do the same, we have collected all 375 million tweets published within a 24-hour time period starting on September 21, 2022. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first complete 24-hour Twitter dataset that is available for the research community. With it, the present work aims to accomplish two goals. First, we seek to answer the aforementioned questions and provide descriptive metrics about Twitter that can serve as references for other researchers. Second, we create a baseline dataset for future research that can be used to study the potential impact of the platform's ownership change.

cs.SI↗

arXiv2022

Using Graph-Aware Reinforcement Learning to Identify Winning Strategies in Diplomacy Games (Student Abstract)

This abstract proposes an approach towards goal-oriented modeling of the detection and modeling complex social phenomena in multiparty discourse in an online political strategy game. We developed a two-tier approach that first encodes sociolinguistic behavior as linguistic features then use reinforcement learning to estimate the advantage afforded to any player. In the first tier, sociolinguistic behavior, such as Friendship and Reasoning, that speakers use to influence others are encoded as linguistic features to identify the persuasive strategies applied by each player in simultaneous two-party dialogues. In the second tier, a reinforcement learning approach is used to estimate a graph-aware reward function to quantify the advantage afforded to each player based on their standing in this multiparty setup. We apply this technique to the game Diplomacy, using a dataset comprising of over 15,000 messages exchanged between 78 users. Our graph-aware approach shows robust performance compared to a context-agnostic setup.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2021

Social Media Reveals Urban-Rural Differences in Stress across China

Modeling differential stress expressions in urban and rural regions in China can provide a better understanding of the effects of urbanization on psychological well-being in a country that has rapidly grown economically in the last two decades. This paper studies linguistic differences in the experiences and expressions of stress in urban-rural China from Weibo posts from over 65,000 users across 329 counties using hierarchical mixed-effects models. We analyzed phrases, topical themes, and psycho-linguistic word choices in Weibo posts mentioning stress to better understand appraisal differences surrounding psychological stress in urban and rural communities in China; we then compared them with large-scale polls from Gallup. After controlling for socioeconomic and gender differences, we found that rural communities tend to express stress in emotional and personal themes such as relationships, health, and opportunity while users in urban areas express stress using relative, temporal, and external themes such as work, politics, and economics. These differences exist beyond controlling for GDP and urbanization, indicating a fundamentally different lifestyle between rural and urban residents in very specific environments, arguably having different sources of stress. We found corroborative trends in physical, financial, and social wellness with urbanization in Gallup polls.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

The CL-SciSumm Shared Task 2018: Results and Key Insights

This overview describes the official results of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task 2018 -- the first medium-scale shared task on scientific document summarization in the computational linguistics (CL) domain. This year, the dataset comprised 60 annotated sets of citing and reference papers from the open access research papers in the CL domain. The Shared Task was organized as a part of the 41st Annual Conference of the Special Interest Group in Information Retrieval (SIGIR), held in Ann Arbor, USA in July 2018. We compare the participating systems in terms of two evaluation metrics. The annotated dataset and evaluation scripts can be accessed and used by the community from: \url{https://github.com/WING-NUS/scisumm-corpus}.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2019

Understanding and Measuring Psychological Stress using Social Media

A body of literature has demonstrated that users' mental health conditions, such as depression and anxiety, can be predicted from their social media language. There is still a gap in the scientific understanding of how psychological stress is expressed on social media. Stress is one of the primary underlying causes and correlates of chronic physical illnesses and mental health conditions. In this paper, we explore the language of psychological stress with a dataset of 601 social media users, who answered the Perceived Stress Scale questionnaire and also consented to share their Facebook and Twitter data. Firstly, we find that stressed users post about exhaustion, losing control, increased self-focus and physical pain as compared to posts about breakfast, family-time, and travel by users who are not stressed. Secondly, we find that Facebook language is more predictive of stress than Twitter language. Thirdly, we demonstrate how the language based models thus developed can be adapted and be scaled to measure county-level trends. Since county-level language is easily available on Twitter using the Streaming API, we explore multiple domain adaptation algorithms to adapt user-level Facebook models to Twitter language. We find that domain-adapted and scaled social media-based measurements of stress outperform sociodemographic variables (age, gender, race, education, and income), against ground-truth survey-based stress measurements, both at the user- and the county-level in the U.S. Twitter language that scores higher in stress is also predictive of poorer health, less access to facilities and lower socioeconomic status in counties. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of using social media as a new tool for monitoring stress levels of both individuals and counties.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2018

Report on the 3rd Joint Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing for Digital Libraries (BIRNDL 2018)

The $3^{rd}$ joint BIRNDL workshop was held at the 41st ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval (SIGIR 2018) in Ann Arbor, USA. BIRNDL 2018 intended to stimulate IR researchers and digital library professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometrics, and recommendation techniques that can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. The workshop incorporated three paper sessions and the $4^{th}$ edition of the CL-SciSumm Shared Task.

cs.IR↗

arXiv2017

Joint Workshop on Bibliometric-enhanced Information Retrieval and Natural Language Processing for Digital Libraries (BIRNDL 2017)

The large scale of scholarly publications poses a challenge for scholars in information seeking and sensemaking. Bibliometrics, information retrieval (IR), text mining and NLP techniques could help in these search and look-up activities, but are not yet widely used. This workshop is intended to stimulate IR researchers and digital library professionals to elaborate on new approaches in natural language processing, information retrieval, scientometrics, text mining and recommendation techniques that can advance the state-of-the-art in scholarly document understanding, analysis, and retrieval at scale. The BIRNDL workshop at SIGIR 2017 will incorporate an invited talk, paper sessions and the third edition of the Computational Linguistics (CL) Scientific Summarization Shared Task.

cs.DL↗