arXiv subjects

Swati Rajwal

Publications and source records attributed to Swati Rajwal.

11 recordsLinked to original sources

arXiv2026

Do LLMs Know a Good Hypothesis When They See One? Logit-Based Energy Scoring Outperforms Prompted LLM-as-Judge for Scientific Hypothesis Ranking

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used for scientific hypothesis generation. However, evaluating generated hypotheses remains a challenge for trustworthy AI-enabled scientific workflows. Existing approaches often use LLMs as judges or rely on semantic similarity, which can favor familiar ideas over novel ones. We propose a logit-based energy scoring method that evaluates hypotheses using a language model's intrinsic confidence rather than comparative judgment. We benchmarked seven language models on 1,323 papers across 12 disciplines. Each paper was paired with its hypothesis and fifteen incorrect alternatives. Intrinsic scoring reached 33.0% Hit@1 pooled across both scorers, compared with 16.6% for prompted listwise ranking. The strongest configuration, a 1-billion-parameter model using logit-based energy scoring, reached 53.1%, though this was the maximum across 14 model-by-scorer combinations selected post hoc. Overall, intrinsic model confidence shows potential for scientific hypothesis evaluation. This study also motivates future research on confidence-based methods for trustworthy AI-enabled scientific discovery.

cs.AI↗

arXiv2025

LLM-as-a-Grader: Practical Insights from Large Language Model for Short-Answer and Report Evaluation

Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly explored for educational tasks such as grading, yet their alignment with human evaluation in real classrooms remains underexamined. In this study, we investigate the feasibility of using an LLM (GPT-4o) to evaluate short-answer quizzes and project reports in an undergraduate Computational Linguistics course. We collect responses from approximately 50 students across five quizzes and receive project reports from 14 teams. LLM-generated scores are compared against human evaluations conducted independently by the course teaching assistants (TAs). Our results show that GPT-4o achieves strong correlation with human graders (up to 0.98) and exact score agreement in 55\% of quiz cases. For project reports, it also shows strong overall alignment with human grading, while exhibiting some variability in scoring technical, open-ended responses. We release all code and sample data to support further research on LLMs in educational assessment. This work highlights both the potential and limitations of LLM-based grading systems and contributes to advancing automated grading in real-world academic settings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Do Biased Models Have Biased Thoughts?

The impressive performance of language models is undeniable. However, the presence of biases based on gender, race, socio-economic status, physical appearance, and sexual orientation makes the deployment of language models challenging. This paper studies the effect of chain-of-thought prompting, a recent approach that studies the steps followed by the model before it responds, on fairness. More specifically, we ask the following question: $\textit{Do biased models have biased thoughts}$? To answer our question, we conduct experiments on $5$ popular large language models using fairness metrics to quantify $11$ different biases in the model's thoughts and output. Our results show that the bias in the thinking steps is not highly correlated with the output bias (less than $0.6$ correlation with a $p$-value smaller than $0.001$ in most cases). In other words, unlike human beings, the tested models with biased decisions do not always possess biased thoughts.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Application of CARE-SD text classifier tools to assess distribution of stigmatizing and doubt-marking language features in EHR

Introduction: Electronic health records (EHR) are a critical medium through which patient stigmatization is perpetuated among healthcare teams. Methods: We identified linguistic features of doubt markers and stigmatizing labels in MIMIC-III EHR via expanded lexicon matching and supervised learning classifiers. Predictors of rates of linguistic features were assessed using Poisson regression models. Results: We found higher rates of stigmatizing labels per chart among patients who were Black or African American (RR: 1.16), patients with Medicare/Medicaid or government-run insurance (RR: 2.46), self-pay (RR: 2.12), and patients with a variety of stigmatizing disease and mental health conditions. Patterns among doubt markers were similar, though male patients had higher rates of doubt markers (RR: 1.25). We found increased stigmatizing labels used by nurses (RR: 1.40), and social workers (RR: 2.25), with similar patterns of doubt markers. Discussion: Stigmatizing language occurred at higher rates among historically stigmatized patients, perpetuated by multiple provider types.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Identifying social isolation themes in NVDRS text narratives using topic modeling and text-classification methods

Social isolation and loneliness, which have been increasing in recent years strongly contribute toward suicide rates. Although social isolation and loneliness are not currently recorded within the US National Violent Death Reporting System's (NVDRS) structured variables, natural language processing (NLP) techniques can be used to identify these constructs in law enforcement and coroner medical examiner narratives. Using topic modeling to generate lexicon development and supervised learning classifiers, we developed high-quality classifiers (average F1: .86, accuracy: .82). Evaluating over 300,000 suicides from 2002 to 2020, we identified 1,198 mentioning chronic social isolation. Decedents had higher odds of chronic social isolation classification if they were men (OR = 1.44; CI: 1.24, 1.69, p<.0001), gay (OR = 3.68; 1.97, 6.33, p<.0001), or were divorced (OR = 3.34; 2.68, 4.19, p<.0001). We found significant predictors for other social isolation topics of recent or impending divorce, child custody loss, eviction or recent move, and break-up. Our methods can improve surveillance and prevention of social isolation and loneliness in the United States.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

Kaleidoscope: In-language Exams for Massively Multilingual Vision Evaluation

The evaluation of vision-language models (VLMs) has mainly relied on English-language benchmarks, leaving significant gaps in both multilingual and multicultural coverage. While multilingual benchmarks have expanded, both in size and languages, many rely on translations of English datasets, failing to capture cultural nuances. In this work, we propose Kaleidoscope, as the most comprehensive exam benchmark to date for the multilingual evaluation of vision-language models. Kaleidoscope is a large-scale, in-language multimodal benchmark designed to evaluate VLMs across diverse languages and visual inputs. Kaleidoscope covers 18 languages and 14 different subjects, amounting to a total of 20,911 multiple-choice questions. Built through an open science collaboration with a diverse group of researchers worldwide, Kaleidoscope ensures linguistic and cultural authenticity. We evaluate top-performing multilingual vision-language models and find that they perform poorly on low-resource languages and in complex multimodal scenarios. Our results highlight the need for progress on culturally inclusive multimodal evaluation frameworks.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2025

HILGEN: Hierarchically-Informed Data Generation for Biomedical NER Using Knowledgebases and Large Language Models

We present HILGEN, a Hierarchically-Informed Data Generation approach that combines domain knowledge from the Unified Medical Language System (UMLS) with synthetic data generated by large language models (LLMs), specifically GPT-3.5. Our approach leverages UMLS's hierarchical structure to expand training data with related concepts, while incorporating contextual information from LLMs through targeted prompts aimed at automatically generating synthetic examples for sparsely occurring named entities. The performance of the HILGEN approach was evaluated across four biomedical NER datasets (MIMIC III, BC5CDR, NCBI-Disease, and Med-Mentions) using BERT-Large and DANN (Data Augmentation with Nearest Neighbor Classifier) models, applying various data generation strategies, including UMLS, GPT-3.5, and their best ensemble. For the BERT-Large model, incorporating UMLS led to an average F1 score improvement of 40.36%, while using GPT-3.5 resulted in a comparable average increase of 40.52%. The Best-Ensemble approach using BERT-Large achieved the highest improvement, with an average increase of 42.29%. DANN model's F1 score improved by 22.74% on average using the UMLS-only approach. The GPT-3.5-based method resulted in a 21.53% increase, and the Best-Ensemble DANN model showed a more notable improvement, with an average increase of 25.03%. Our proposed HILGEN approach improves NER performance in few-shot settings without requiring additional manually annotated data. Our experiments demonstrate that an effective strategy for optimizing biomedical NER is to combine biomedical knowledge curated in the past, such as the UMLS, and generative LLMs to create synthetic training instances. Our future research will focus on exploring additional innovative synthetic data generation strategies for further improving NER performance.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Decade of Natural Language Processing in Chronic Pain: A Systematic Review

In recent years, the intersection of Natural Language Processing (NLP) and public health has opened innovative pathways for investigating various domains, including chronic pain in textual datasets. Despite the promise of NLP in chronic pain, the literature is dispersed across various disciplines, and there is a need to consolidate existing knowledge, identify knowledge gaps in the literature, and inform future research directions in this emerging field. This review aims to investigate the state of the research on NLP-based interventions designed for chronic pain research. A search strategy was formulated and executed across PubMed, Web of Science, IEEE Xplore, Scopus, and ACL Anthology to find studies published in English between 2014 and 2024. After screening 132 papers, 26 studies were included in the final review. Key findings from this review underscore the significant potential of NLP techniques to address pressing challenges in chronic pain research. The past 10 years in this field have showcased the utilization of advanced methods (transformers like RoBERTa and BERT) achieving high-performance metrics (e.g., F1>0.8) in classification tasks, while unsupervised approaches like Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) and k-means clustering have proven effective for exploratory analyses. Results also reveal persistent challenges such as limited dataset diversity, inadequate sample sizes, and insufficient representation of underrepresented populations. Future research studies should explore multimodal data validation systems, context-aware mechanistic modeling, and the development of standardized evaluation metrics to enhance reproducibility and equity in chronic pain research.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

INCLUDE: Evaluating Multilingual Language Understanding with Regional Knowledge

The performance differential of large language models (LLM) between languages hinders their effective deployment in many regions, inhibiting the potential economic and societal value of generative AI tools in many communities. However, the development of functional LLMs in many languages (\ie, multilingual LLMs) is bottlenecked by the lack of high-quality evaluation resources in languages other than English. Moreover, current practices in multilingual benchmark construction often translate English resources, ignoring the regional and cultural knowledge of the environments in which multilingual systems would be used. In this work, we construct an evaluation suite of 197,243 QA pairs from local exam sources to measure the capabilities of multilingual LLMs in a variety of regional contexts. Our novel resource, INCLUDE, is a comprehensive knowledge- and reasoning-centric benchmark across 44 written languages that evaluates multilingual LLMs for performance in the actual language environments where they would be deployed.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2024

Two-Layer Retrieval-Augmented Generation Framework for Low-Resource Medical Question Answering Using Reddit Data: Proof-of-Concept Study

The increasing use of social media to share lived and living experiences of substance use presents a unique opportunity to obtain information on side effects, use patterns, and opinions on novel psychoactive substances. However, due to the large volume of data, obtaining useful insights through natural language processing technologies such as large language models is challenging. This paper aims to develop a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) architecture for medical question answering pertaining to clinicians' queries on emerging issues associated with health-related topics, using user-generated medical information on social media. We proposed a two-layer RAG framework for query-focused answer generation and evaluated a proof of concept for the framework in the context of query-focused summary generation from social media forums, focusing on emerging drug-related information. Our modular framework generates individual summaries followed by an aggregated summary to answer medical queries from large amounts of user-generated social media data in an efficient manner. We compared the performance of a quantized large language model (Nous-Hermes-2-7B-DPO), deployable in low-resource settings, with GPT-4. For this proof-of-concept study, we used user-generated data from Reddit to answer clinicians' questions on the use of xylazine and ketamine. Our framework achieves comparable median scores in terms of relevance, length, hallucination, coverage, and coherence when evaluated using GPT-4 and Nous-Hermes-2-7B-DPO, evaluated for 20 queries with 76 samples. There was no statistically significant difference between the two for coverage, coherence, relevance, length, and hallucination. A statistically significant difference was noted for the Coleman-Liau Index. Our RAG framework can effectively answer medical questions about targeted topics and can be deployed in resource-constrained settings.

cs.CL↗

arXiv2022

Generalizable Natural Language Processing Framework for Migraine Reporting from Social Media

Migraine is a high-prevalence and disabling neurological disorder. However, information migraine management in real-world settings could be limited to traditional health information sources. In this paper, we (i) verify that there is substantial migraine-related chatter available on social media (Twitter and Reddit), self-reported by migraine sufferers; (ii) develop a platform-independent text classification system for automatically detecting self-reported migraine-related posts, and (iii) conduct analyses of the self-reported posts to assess the utility of social media for studying this problem. We manually annotated 5750 Twitter posts and 302 Reddit posts. Our system achieved an F1 score of 0.90 on Twitter and 0.93 on Reddit. Analysis of information posted by our 'migraine cohort' revealed the presence of a plethora of relevant information about migraine therapies and patient sentiments associated with them. Our study forms the foundation for conducting an in-depth analysis of migraine-related information using social media data.

cs.CL↗