arXiv subjects

Owen Rambow

Publications and source records attributed to Owen Rambow.

At least 19 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Implicit vs. Explicit Prompting Strategies for LVLMs in Referential Communication

Two recent studies \citep{jones2026llms, zeng2026lvlms} reach apparently contradictory conclusions about whether large vision-language models (LVLMs) can coordinate similarly to humans on efficient referring expressions. We control for task differences between the studies while directly comparing their prompting styles. We replicate the finding that models can coordinate efficient referring expressions when \textit{explicitly} prompted to do so, suggesting that other task differences are not responsible for divergent results. However, we also find that the same models fail to infer the need for communicative efficiency from a more \textit{implicit} prompt, highlighting critical differences between how humans and AI systems communicate.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2026

When Seeing Is Not Enough: Benchmarking Interactive Visual Grounding in LVLMs

Visual grounding is typically evaluated as a one-shot mapping from an informative referring expression to a visual target. This formulation misses a central property of real-world reference: initial referring expressions are often incomplete or ambiguous, requiring participants to establish shared understanding through interaction. We introduce a controlled evaluation framework for interactive visual grounding in large vision-language models (LVLMs), varying how much target information is provided upfront and how much must be acquired through dialogue. Across four human-grounded visual contexts and four interaction protocols, current LVLMs perform significantly below task-level human baselines. Interaction can help when follow-up questions refine or repair an initial target description. Performance is lowest when no initial description is provided and target information must be acquired through questions, indicating that proactive question-driven grounding remains difficult. LVLMs are also poorly calibrated, often reporting confidence that exceeds their empirical accuracy. Follow-up studies confirm these patterns across varied description sources (human versus AI), reasoning efforts, repeated interactions, description providers, and visual contexts. Overall, interactive visual grounding remains challenging, requiring visual matching, information seeking and synthesis.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2026

LVLMs and Humans Ground Differently in Referential Communication

For generative AI agents to partner effectively with human users, the ability to accurately predict human intent is critical. But this ability to collaborate remains limited by a critical deficit: an inability to model common ground. We present a referential communication experiment with a factorial design involving director-matcher pairs (human-human, human-AI, AI-human, and AI-AI) that interact with multiple turns in repeated rounds to match pictures of objects not associated with any obvious lexicalized labels. We show that LVLMs cannot interactively generate and resolve referring expressions in a way that enables smooth communication, a crucial skill that underlies human language use. We release our corpus of 356 dialogues (89 pairs over 4 rounds each) along with the online pipeline for data collection and the tools for analyzing accuracy, efficiency, and lexical overlap.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

XAM: Interactive Explainability for Authorship Attribution Models

We present IXAM, an Interactive eXplainability framework for Authorship Attribution Models. Given an authorship attribution (AA) task and an embedding-based AA model, our tool enables users to interactively explore the model's embedding space and construct an explanation of the model's prediction as a set of writing style features at different levels of granularity. Through a user evaluation, we demonstrate the value of our framework compared to predefined stylistic explanations.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Gram2Vec: An Interpretable Document Vectorizer

We present Gram2Vec, a grammatical style embedding system that embeds documents into a higher dimensional space by extracting the normalized relative frequencies of grammatical features present in the text. Compared to neural approaches, Gram2Vec offers inherent interpretability based on how the feature vectors are generated. In this paper, we use authorship verification and AI detection as two applications to show how Gram2Vec can be used. For authorship verification, we use the features from Gram2Vec to explain why a pair of documents is by the same or by different authors. We also demonstrate how Gram2Vec features can be used to train a classifier for AI detection, outperforming machine learning models trained on a comparable set of Biber features.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

LVLMs are Bad at Overhearing Human Referential Communication

During spontaneous conversations, speakers collaborate on novel referring expressions, which they can then re-use in subsequent conversations. Understanding such referring expressions is an important ability for an embodied agent, so that it can carry out tasks in the real world. This requires integrating and understanding language, vision, and conversational interaction. We study the capabilities of seven state-of-the-art Large Vision Language Models (LVLMs) as overhearers to a corpus of spontaneous conversations between pairs of human discourse participants engaged in a collaborative object-matching task. We find that such a task remains challenging for current LVLMs and they all fail to show a consistent performance improvement as they overhear more conversations from the same discourse participants repeating the same task for multiple rounds. We release our corpus and code for reproducibility and to facilitate future research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Residualized Similarity for Faithfully Explainable Authorship Verification

Responsible use of Authorship Verification (AV) systems not only requires high accuracy but also interpretable solutions. More importantly, for systems to be used to make decisions with real-world consequences requires the model's prediction to be explainable using interpretable features that can be traced to the original texts. Neural methods achieve high accuracies, but their representations lack direct interpretability. Furthermore, LLM predictions cannot be explained faithfully -- if there is an explanation given for a prediction, it doesn't represent the reasoning process behind the model's prediction. In this paper, we introduce Residualized Similarity (RS), a novel method that supplements systems using interpretable features with a neural network to improve their performance while maintaining interpretability. Authorship verification is fundamentally a similarity task, where the goal is to measure how alike two documents are. The key idea is to use the neural network to predict a similarity residual, i.e. the error in the similarity predicted by the interpretable system. Our evaluation across four datasets shows that not only can we match the performance of state-of-the-art authorship verification models, but we can show how and to what degree the final prediction is faithful and interpretable.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Evaluating LLMs with Multiple Problems at once

This paper shows the benefits and fruitfulness of evaluating LLMs with multiple problems at once, a paradigm we call multi-problem evaluation (MPE). Unlike conventional single-problem evaluation, where a prompt presents a single problem and expects one specific answer, MPE places multiple problems together in a single prompt and assesses how well an LLM answers all these problems in a single output. Leveraging 6 classification and 12 reasoning benchmarks that already exist, we introduce a new benchmark called ZeMPE (Zero-shot Multi-Problem Evaluation), comprising 53,100 zero-shot multi-problem prompts. We experiment with a total of 13 LLMs from 5 model families on ZeMPE to present a comprehensive and systematic MPE. Our results show that LLMs are capable of handling multiple problems from a single data source as well as handling them separately, but there are conditions this multiple problem handling capability falls short. In addition, we perform in-depth further analyses and explore model-level factors that may enable multiple problem handling capabilities in LLMs. We release our corpus and code to facilitate future research.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

LLMs can Perform Multi-Dimensional Analytic Writing Assessments: A Case Study of L2 Graduate-Level Academic English Writing

The paper explores the performance of LLMs in the context of multi-dimensional analytic writing assessments, i.e. their ability to provide both scores and comments based on multiple assessment criteria. Using a corpus of literature reviews written by L2 graduate students and assessed by human experts against 9 analytic criteria, we prompt several popular LLMs to perform the same task under various conditions. To evaluate the quality of feedback comments, we apply a novel feedback comment quality evaluation framework. This framework is interpretable, cost-efficient, scalable, and reproducible, compared to existing methods that rely on manual judgments. We find that LLMs can generate reasonably good and generally reliable multi-dimensional analytic assessments. We release our corpus and code for reproducibility.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

OmniVox: Zero-Shot Emotion Recognition with Omni-LLMs

The use of omni-LLMs (large language models that accept any modality as input), particularly for multimodal cognitive state tasks involving speech, is understudied. We present OmniVox, the first systematic evaluation of four omni-LLMs on the zero-shot emotion recognition task. We evaluate on two widely used multimodal emotion benchmarks: IEMOCAP and MELD, and find zero-shot omni-LLMs outperform or are competitive with fine-tuned audio models. Alongside our audio-only evaluation, we also evaluate omni-LLMs on text only and text and audio. We present acoustic prompting, an audio-specific prompting strategy for omni-LLMs which focuses on acoustic feature analysis, conversation context analysis, and step-by-step reasoning. We compare our acoustic prompting to minimal prompting and full chain-of-thought prompting techniques. We perform a context window analysis on IEMOCAP and MELD, and find that using context helps, especially on IEMOCAP. We conclude with an error analysis on the generated acoustic reasoning outputs from the omni-LLMs.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Active Few-Shot Learning for Text Classification

The rise of Large Language Models (LLMs) has boosted the use of Few-Shot Learning (FSL) methods in natural language processing, achieving acceptable performance even when working with limited training data. The goal of FSL is to effectively utilize a small number of annotated samples in the learning process. However, the performance of FSL suffers when unsuitable support samples are chosen. This problem arises due to the heavy reliance on a limited number of support samples, which hampers consistent performance improvement even when more support samples are added. To address this challenge, we propose an active learning-based instance selection mechanism that identifies effective support instances from the unlabeled pool and can work with different LLMs. Our experiments on five tasks show that our method frequently improves the performance of FSL. We make our implementation available on GitHub.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Zero-Shot Belief: A Hard Problem for LLMs

We present two LLM-based approaches to zero-shot source-and-target belief prediction on FactBank: a unified system that identifies events, sources, and belief labels in a single pass, and a hybrid approach that uses a fine-tuned DeBERTa tagger for event detection. We show that multiple open-sourced, closed-source, and reasoning-based LLMs struggle with the task. Using the hybrid approach, we achieve new state-of-the-art results on FactBank and offer a detailed error analysis. Our approach is then tested on the Italian belief corpus ModaFact.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Synthetic Audio Helps for Cognitive State Tasks

The NLP community has broadly focused on text-only approaches of cognitive state tasks, but audio can provide vital missing cues through prosody. We posit that text-to-speech models learn to track aspects of cognitive state in order to produce naturalistic audio, and that the signal audio models implicitly identify is orthogonal to the information that language models exploit. We present Synthetic Audio Data fine-tuning (SAD), a framework where we show that 7 tasks related to cognitive state modeling benefit from multimodal training on both text and zero-shot synthetic audio data from an off-the-shelf TTS system. We show an improvement over the text-only modality when adding synthetic audio data to text-only corpora. Furthermore, on tasks and corpora that do contain gold audio, we show our SAD framework achieves competitive performance with text and synthetic audio compared to text and gold audio.

cs.SD↗

arXiv2024

Training LLMs to Recognize Hedges in Spontaneous Narratives

Hedges allow speakers to mark utterances as provisional, whether to signal non-prototypicality or "fuzziness", to indicate a lack of commitment to an utterance, to attribute responsibility for a statement to someone else, to invite input from a partner, or to soften critical feedback in the service of face-management needs. Here we focus on hedges in an experimentally parameterized corpus of 63 Roadrunner cartoon narratives spontaneously produced from memory by 21 speakers for co-present addressees, transcribed to text (Galati and Brennan, 2010). We created a gold standard of hedges annotated by human coders (the Roadrunner-Hedge corpus) and compared three LLM-based approaches for hedge detection: fine-tuning BERT, and zero and few-shot prompting with GPT-4o and LLaMA-3. The best-performing approach was a fine-tuned BERT model, followed by few-shot GPT-4o. After an error analysis on the top performing approaches, we used an LLM-in-the-Loop approach to improve the gold standard coding, as well as to highlight cases in which hedges are ambiguous in linguistically interesting ways that will guide future research. This is the first step in our research program to train LLMs to interpret and generate collateral signals appropriately and meaningfully in conversation.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Examining Gender and Power on Wikipedia Through Face and Politeness

We propose a framework for analyzing discourse by combining two interdependent concepts from sociolinguistic theory: face acts and politeness. While politeness has robust existing tools and data, face acts are less resourced. We introduce a new corpus created by annotating Wikipedia talk pages with face acts and we use this to train a face act tagger. We then employ our framework to study how face and politeness interact with gender and power in discussions between Wikipedia editors. Among other findings, we observe that female Wikipedians are not only more polite, which is consistent with prior studies, but that this difference corresponds with significantly more language directed at humbling aspects of their own face. Interestingly, the distinction nearly vanishes once limiting to editors with administrative power.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Multimodal Belief Prediction

Recognizing a speaker's level of commitment to a belief is a difficult task; humans do not only interpret the meaning of the words in context, but also understand cues from intonation and other aspects of the audio signal. Many papers and corpora in the NLP community have approached the belief prediction task using text-only approaches. We are the first to frame and present results on the multimodal belief prediction task. We use the CB-Prosody corpus (CBP), containing aligned text and audio with speaker belief annotations. We first report baselines and significant features using acoustic-prosodic features and traditional machine learning methods. We then present text and audio baselines for the CBP corpus fine-tuning on BERT and Whisper respectively. Finally, we present our multimodal architecture which fine-tunes on BERT and Whisper and uses multiple fusion methods, improving on both modalities alone.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Views Are My Own, but Also Yours: Benchmarking Theory of Mind Using Common Ground

Evaluating the theory of mind (ToM) capabilities of language models (LMs) has recently received a great deal of attention. However, many existing benchmarks rely on synthetic data, which risks misaligning the resulting experiments with human behavior. We introduce the first ToM dataset based on naturally occurring spoken dialogs, Common-ToM, and show that LMs struggle to demonstrate ToM. We then show that integrating a simple, explicit representation of beliefs improves LM performance on Common-ToM.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Intention and Face in Dialog

The notion of face described by Brown and Levinson (1987) has been studied in great detail, but a critical aspect of the framework, that which focuses on how intentions mediate the planning of turns which impose upon face, has received far less attention. We present an analysis of three computational systems trained for classifying both intention and politeness, focusing on how the former influences the latter. In politeness theory, agents attend to the desire to have their wants appreciated (positive face), and a complementary desire to act unimpeded and maintain freedom (negative face). Similar to speech acts, utterances can perform so-called face acts which can either raise or threaten the positive or negative face of the speaker or hearer. We begin by using an existing corpus to train a model which classifies face acts, achieving a new SoTA in the process. We then observe that every face act has an underlying intention that motivates it and perform additional experiments integrating dialog act annotations to provide these intentions by proxy. Our analysis finds that dialog acts improve performance on face act detection for minority classes and points to a close relationship between aspects of face and intent.

cs.CL↗