Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in computational social science to assign scalar scores to social and psychological constructs. However, studies use different rating scales, and whether their scores remain comparable across scale designs is understudied. To address this gap, we define and systematically investigate scale sensitivity, the variation in LLM-generated scores caused by rating scale design. We distinguish numerical sensitivity, changes in normalized scores, from semantic sensitivity, changes in score interpretation. To assess both, our experimental design crosses 2 formats (continuous vs. ordinal), 4 ranges (3, 5, 11, and 21 points), and 2 signs (signed vs. unsigned) across 3 tasks (political leaning, sentiment, and toxicity), 2 prompting strategies (zero-shot and rubric-based), and 5 LLMs. We find that changing one design element shifts normalized scores by about 0.10 on average and changes the category of roughly 20% of texts. Sensitivity is greatest for toxicity, the only unipolar construct examined. Also, rubric-based prompting does not reduce sensitivity compared with zero-shot prompting. We provide practical guidance for designing more reliable LLM-based text scoring and highlight the need for robustness checks across alternative scales.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.22187
Multimodal sentiment models are usually evaluated on complete utterances, yet streams often lose a contiguous span of text, audio, or video. We study local missingness on aligned CMU-MOSEI features. Our reliability-aware network (RM-Net) keeps the original temporal positions, represents unobserved positions with a learned token, outputs bounded per-modality intensity contributions gated by observation quality, and is trained with dual-view masking of contiguous segments. We fuse five RM-Net seeds with a LoRA-adapted BERT text expert, using a fusion weight that depends only on the visible fraction of content tokens. Architecture, checkpoint, and fusion choices were made on the validation split. On the held-out split, the fused model reaches a macro-F1 of 0.655 on clean inputs and 0.634 under 40\% mixed missingness; its two-view average exceeds the auxiliary-head baseline by 0.024 (95\% video-cluster bootstrap interval [0.003, 0.045]). Because this split was inspected during development, these numbers are not a blind test. For explanations, exact Shapley attributions over the eight modality subsets and position-level occlusion show that top-ranked positions reduce the predicted-class probability faster than random positions (AUC gap 0.113 on validation). We also describe an auditable word-level alignment pipeline for raw clips; its outputs do not feed the predictive models.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.20543
Many sentiment datasets use one annotator for each item, so the test labels show the conventions of that person. We build a Nepali benchmark from two annotators who labelled the same sentences blind. They labelled 5,614 sentences from tweets of Nepali public figures on a five-point scale. We keep only the 3,189 sentences where both give the same polarity. On the three-class benchmark, NepBERTa with a fixed tokenizer gets a macro-F1 of 0.877 and IndicBERTv2 0.867. Three commercial large language models (LLMs) get 0.882 to 0.896 zero-shot, and these differences are not significant. On the five-point scale, 766 sentences have two adjacent labels, for example Pos and SPos. We accept both labels and train on both. On this task, Claude Opus 5.5 beats the best encoders by 0.10 to 0.12 macro-F1. A tokenizer audit adds a second result. The default tokenizers of three Nepali BERT models delete the non-spacing Devanagari vowel signs and the virama. When we restore the marks, macro-F1 increases by 0.084 for NepBERTa but decreases by 0.095 for a model pretrained on stripped text.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.19190
The stories told about artificial intelligence (AI) play a central role in shaping public understanding, policy debates, and expectations about technological change. News media are especially influential in this process. Using a cross-regional corpus of 12,924 English-language news articles about AI published since 2022, we examine how storytelling about AI varies across media systems in four regions: North America, China, India, and the Middle East. Leveraging large language models, we extract the implicit narrative lessons conveyed by each article---commonly known as story morals---capturing value-laden interpretations that extend beyond thematic content or sentiment. We find that North American AI coverage is uniquely characterized by narratives of caution, while under-emphasizing narratives of innovation and collaboration that are more prevalent elsewhere. However, this pattern is largely explained by a broader regional negativity bias in North American news sentiment, rather than by heightened concern about AI itself. Our findings bring into view the culturally conditioned nature of AI news narratives.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.18573
Sparse autoencoders decompose language model representations into interpretable features, but feature interpretation in this literature remains predominantly correlational. Attribution methods offer more direct estimates of feature influence, yet their faithfulness to actual causal effects has not been systematically evaluated in the SAE setting. We apply SHAP-based attribution to SAE latent features and evaluate it against direct causal intervention, using sentiment classification on SST-2 with GPT-2 Small and a 32,768-feature layer-7 SAE as a testbed. We compare SHAP to Integrated Gradients, Gradient$\times$Input, and probe-weight baselines across linear and MLP probe arms, scoring each against feature ablation and activation steering measured through the language model's own logit difference. Most faithfulness associations we measure do not survive multiple-comparison correction, and attribution methods that agree strongly with one another ($\rho = 0.42$--$0.80$) agree poorly with measured causal effects, indicating that inter-method agreement is not evidence of causal faithfulness. Two effects hold under control. First, local per-example attribution retains a directional advantage over global averaged attribution, while its apparent importance advantage is explained by feature activity rather than superior causal ranking. Second, under known-ground-truth minimal pairs, attribution recovers inserted sentiment signal well above chance (AUROC $0.792$) but fails to localize deletions (AUROC $0.520$), suggesting that these methods detect the presence of a feature's influence more reliably than its absence. We argue that importance faithfulness and directional faithfulness are separable properties requiring separate evaluation, and that attribution agreement should not substitute for causal validation.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17898
The original EneMonIE proposal describes a Web-based semantic system for continuously monitoring energy trends through targeted information extraction from heterogeneous online media. This article presents EneMonIE-Backend, an implementation-derived redesign that converts that conceptual pipeline into a modular, executable, and application-independent backend. The architecture separates five concerns: data sources, acquisition and normalization, semantic processing, knowledge organization, and persistent storage. It operationalizes configurable connectors for RSS feeds, URL collections, arXiv, social-media JSON files, and open-data CSV files; it also introduces question-driven Web search and scraping. Relevant documents pass through energy categorization, named entity recognition, temporal and event extraction, source sensitive sentiment analysis, and extractive summarization. The resulting semantic representations support entity co-occurrence graphs, cross-document interlinking, cluster-level information fusion, and relational persistence in SQLite. Three grounded question-answering paths are exposed at the backend level: live Web evidence, the stored corpus, and selected configured resources. Answer generation uses a language model when configured and otherwise falls back to deterministic extractive output. Unlike the original proposal, the presented architecture deliberately excludes the user-interface and server-side application layers, allowing the semantic core to be embedded in different applications. A deterministic smoke validation confirms relevance filtering, persistence, clustering, evidence retrieval, and document deletion. The work provides a reproducible architectural basis for future evaluation on larger multilingual energy corpora.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17243
Information extraction models often perform well on the datasets they are trained on, but transferring to new domains and annotation guidelines remains challenging. Supporting user-specified types alone does not resolve this problem. We present CalOn, a unified 0.6B-parameter encoder for entity, relation, and event extraction across datasets and schemas. The model jointly encodes text and type definitions, then directly identifies entity spans, relations between spans, and event triggers and arguments. Its extraction decisions consider the requested types together, using their combined evidence to identify relevant candidates before assigning a type. This gives all three tasks a common probabilistic formulation while keeping every extracted mention anchored to the input text. We train on diverse sources, and supplement supervised learning with a reward that encourages correct extractions and penalises incorrect ones. Across 40 benchmarks, CalOn outperforms the evaluated baselines on most benchmarks. It leads all reported relation extraction benchmarks and achieves the highest average F1 for event triggers and arguments with gold triggers. The same model also performs strongly on aspect sentiment triplet extraction and pronoun resolution through its span-pair formulation. A correction for the probability bias introduced during training improves confidence estimates for entities, relations, and event arguments after calibration, with little change in F1.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.17113
Detecting communicative meaning in dialogue requires modeling not only lexical content but also the participant-role structures through which sentiment, emotion, politeness, and formality (SEPF) are expressed. Existing approaches rely on contextual language representations while leaving semantic roles implicit. We introduce a role-aware transformer architecture that maps the four SEPF dimensions to theory-grounded Semantic Role Labeling (SRL) configurations, incorporating these configurations directly into the transformer's self-attention mechanism. Role-aware attention models non-directional internal states (sentiment and emotion), while directional role-aware attention captures initiator-to-recipient relations for external cues (politeness and formality). The resulting role-aware representations are fused with contextual embeddings through a learned gate that adaptively weights how much role information each input contributes, rather than appending semantic roles as an auxiliary feature vector. Across four benchmark datasets, the framework yields statistically reliable gains over strong BERT-based baselines for emotion, politeness, and formality, with gains concentrated in theoretically predicted cases such as low-frequency, complex emotions and highly polite expressions; sentiment improvements are marginal and non-significant, suggesting that sentiment is conveyed more through lexical choice than participant-role structure. Additional evaluation on real-world data demonstrates that the framework improves both predictive performance and model traceability. These results demonstrate that linguistically grounded modifications to transformer self-attention improve the detection of communicative meaning, generalize beyond benchmark datasets to real-world mental-health data, and yield traceable, role-grounded explanations that extend beyond predictive performance to interpretability.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.13797
This study addresses the problem of structured sentiment analysis, whose goal is to obtain a fine-grained sentiment graph where the nodes represent spans of sentiment holders, targets, and expressions, while the arcs define the relationships among them. Our proposed approach casts the task as dependency graph parsing, but departs from traditional parsing methods by solving it through sequence labeling. To do so, we leverage recent advances in linearized graph encodings that allow each word in the input to be assigned a label, effectively capturing the structure of the dependency graph. We conducted experiments on seven datasets spanning five languages (English, Spanish, Norwegian, Basque, and Catalan), showing performance competitive with leading, more complex single-model approaches.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.11695
Social media is a rich source of real-time public sentiment, but widely used sentiment analysis tools are often applied without understanding their limitations. In this study, we evaluate the inter-rater reliability of three bespoke sentiment analysis tools (TextBlob, VADER, and Twitter-roBERTa-base) and three large language models (LLMs: Qwen3-32B, GPT-OSS-120B, Llama-4-Maverick-17B) against six human raters across 100 tweets. We measured agreement using two statistical measures: Cohen's kappa for pairwise comparisons and Fleiss' kappa for multiple raters. Even among the human raters, our results showed only fair agreement, highlighting the subjectivity of sentiment analysis. Higher agreement was observed under the binary sentiment classification (negative vs. non-negative and positive vs. non-positive) than under the three-class classification across both humans and automated tools. The Twitter-roBERTa-base model showed the strongest alignment with human ratings, outperforming both bespoke sentiment tools and LLMs, particularly in distinguishing negative versus non-negative sentiment. LLMs showed substantial agreement among themselves and moderate to substantial alignment with humans, performing better in positive vs. non-positive classifications. Our findings underscore that domain-specific fine-tuning remains crucial for reliable social media sentiment analysis, and human-centered evaluation remains essential for establishing gold-standard labels.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.10318
Political discourse often uses rhetorical and persuasive language to frame narratives, influence public opinion, and mobilize audiences. While Bangla natural language processing has made progress in sentiment analysis and opinion mining, systematic benchmarking of transformer models for fine-grained rhetorical and persuasion technique detection in Bangla political speech remains largely underexplored. This paper presents a benchmark study of transformer-based models for detecting rhetorical form and persuasive intent in Bangla political discourse. Using BanglaRhet, a manually annotated corpus of 30,289 Bangla political speech segments collected from publicly available political news sources, we formulate two supervised single-label classification tasks: rhetorical technique detection (contrast, repetition, exaggeration, metaphor, rhetorical questions) and persuasion technique detection (blame assignment, call to action, unity call, moral, emotional, and logical appeals). We evaluate four transformer-based models, BanglaBERT, BanglaBERT-Base, SahajBERT, and XLM-RoBERTa-Base, against classical TF-IDF baselines. BanglaBERT achieves the highest performance, with 65.40% macro-F1 for rhetorical technique detection and 66.46% for persuasion technique detection, outperforming the best tuned classical baseline by 19.2 and 13.8 macro-F1 points, respectively. Class-level analysis indicates that errors are mainly associated with semantic overlap among labels, figurative language, and class imbalance. The results provide initial benchmark baselines for Bangla rhetorical and persuasion-aware political discourse analysis and highlight the need for context-aware and multi-label modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.09464
LLMs are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in social environments, making it critical to study their ability to faithfully simulate human interactions. Central to this is grounding agents in realistic user personas, yet existing datasets rely on fictional personas and are limited to a handful of languages, lacking the empirical grounding necessary to evaluate behavioral fidelity across diverse populations. We introduce Wiki-Talkie, a multilingual dataset of real-world conversations from Wikipedia Talk pages across five languages spanning two language families: Germanic (German, English) and Romance (Spanish, French, Italian), paired with personas derived from real user communities and encompassing sociodemographic attributes, self-descriptions, and behaviorally grounded interaction traits. Using Wiki-Talkie, we evaluate agent interactional behavior on a next-turn generation task across various persona conditioning strategies. Our evaluation assesses whether agents collectively reproduce the distributional behavioral patterns observed in human discussions. Results show that user's comment history exemplifying interaction behavior consistently outperforms explicit persona information. In addition, models systematically underproduce negative or extreme sentiments, while over producing references and suggestions, revealing biases toward agreeableness and positivity. Crucially, these patterns hold robustly across languages, with small cross-lingual differences.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.08513
The self-attention mechanism is central to the success of Transformer architectures. However, standard row-stochastic attention has been shown to suffer from significant signal degradation across layers. In particular, it can induce rank collapse, resulting in increasingly uniform token representations, as well as entropy collapse, characterized by highly concentrated attention distributions. Recent work has highlighted the benefits of doubly stochastic attention as a form of entropy regularization, promoting a more balanced attention distribution and leading to improved empirical performance. In this paper, we study rank collapse across network depth and show that doubly stochastic attention matrices normalized with Sinkhorn algorithm preserve rank more effectively than standard softmax row-stochastic ones. As previously shown for softmax, skip connections are crucial to mitigate rank collapse. We empirically validate this phenomenon on both sentiment analysis and image classification tasks. Moreover, we derive a theoretical bound for the pure self-attention rank decay when using Sinkhorn normalization and find that rank decays to one doubly exponentially with depth, a phenomenon that has already been shown for softmax.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07925
User behavior simulation is the computational modeling of user interactions within information systems through the use of simulated agents in place of live users. It supports system testing and evaluation, decision-making and forecasting, and user experience design. Existing simulators rely on hand-crafted rules or domain expertise that transfers poorly across tasks. SWORD (Simulation-driven Workflow and Prompt Optimization with Role-based Design) is introduced as a framework that jointly optimizes multi-agent workflow topology and natural-language prompts. It is guided solely by a scalar task metric, without domain initialization or task-specific engineering. The experimental results demonstrate that SWORD achieves statistically significant gains over prompt-only, workflow-only, and staged-optimization baselines under a controlled, identical-backbone comparison. Against the strongest published domain-specific baseline, SWORD further improves accuracy while using a smaller backbone model, substantially less training data, and a very reasonable API cost (\$4--\$6 for each dataset). Beyond predictive performance, SWORD autonomously discovers domain-relevant signals, review-sentiment mapping rules and epidemiological decay priors, purely from scalar error feedback, establishing textual gradients as a mechanism for unsupervised feature-importance discovery in user behavior modeling.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.07663
Researchers increasingly use Large Language Models as judges (LLM-as-a-judge) to evaluate model outputs. Yet there are no standards for how to design these judges. Typically, researchers choose the prompt, rating scale, and model intuitively. If these choices change the judge's verdicts, two studies can reach different conclusions about the same facts. To address this risk and to provide an empirical basis for judge designs, we evaluate 10 reasoning models across multiple designs on two tasks: a scalar rating of sentence sentiment and toxicity (over 500 items per category), as well as a binary accuracy classification of question-answer pairs (n=600). For the rating tasks, despite judges showing significant disagreements with the human ground truth, the practical size of differences is small enough to consider most judges reliable (mean absolute deviation of 0.11 points on a 1 - 7 scale); toxicity judges even outperform standard classifiers. Judges are also highly accurate on average (96.5%) for the accuracy classification task. However, design choices can produce shifts: changing the rating scale alone can shift measured bias by up to 0.93 points (rating task), and while accuracy levels are rarely impacted, design choices consistently impact judge leniency (classification task; leniency drop of 28.9 percentage points when using detailed prompts, and up to 56.1 percentage points when switching models). Counterintuitively, lower reasoning effort affects neither accuracy nor leniency. Across both tasks, model identity is the dominant source of variance. These findings suggest that while LLM judges are broadly trustworthy in aggregate, design choices can be meaningful sources of variance. Given the growing reliance on automated evaluation in LLM research, we intend this study as a methodological reference for designing more robust and replicable LLM-as-a-judge pipelines.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.05094
Mental health stigma has profoundly harmful impacts but its complexity makes it difficult to evaluate. Stigma may involve explicit derogation, but also subtler forms of blame, fear, paternalistic pity, social distancing, structural exclusion, and discrimination. We introduce a theory-grounded benchmark for automatic evaluation of mental health stigma in online communication, consisting of naturally occurring online news and social media text annotated with a fine-grained taxonomy of stigma across multiple mental health conditions. Our annotation framework comprises a binary stigma-detection task and a multi-level taxonomy covering (i) stigma mode, (ii) domain, and (iii) specific components of certain forms of stigma. We apply this framework to texts mentioning six mental health conditions and evaluate large language models alongside stigma-related classifiers for detecting sentiment, toxicity, and hate speech. Results show that mental health stigma is not well captured by models trained to detect these neighboring constructs, and that LLMs often overpredict stigma unless given explicit operational rules - mirroring the importance of decision rules in human annotation. We release the publicly available part of benchmark, annotations, prototypical exemplars of stigma and code at: this https URL.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.02775
Broadly applicable quantum advantage, particularly in classical data processing and machine learning, has been a fundamental open problem. In this work, we prove that a small quantum computer of polylogarithmic size can perform large-scale classification and dimension reduction on massive classical data by processing samples on the fly, whereas any classical machine achieving the same prediction performance requires exponentially larger size. Furthermore, classical machines that are exponentially larger yet below the required size need superpolynomially more samples and time. We provide evidence for these quantum advantages in real-world applications, including single-cell RNA sequencing and movie review sentiment analysis, demonstrating four to six orders of magnitude reduction in size with fewer than 60 logical qubits. These quantum advantages are enabled by quantum oracle sketching, an algorithm for accessing the classical world in quantum superposition using only random classical data samples. Combined with classical shadows, our algorithm circumvents the data loading and readout bottleneck to construct succinct classical models from massive classical data, a task provably impossible for any classical machine that is not exponentially larger than the quantum machine. These quantum advantages persist even when classical machines are granted unlimited time or if BPP = BQP, and rely only on the correctness of quantum mechanics. Together, our results establish machine learning on classical data as a broad and natural domain of quantum advantage and a fundamental test of quantum mechanics at the complexity frontier.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.07639
Vision-Language Models (VLMs) enable video annotation at scale, but costs accumulate quickly: processing a typical 60-second short-form video at one frame per second requires millions of tokens. To reduce costs, researchers rely on heuristics such as sampling a subset of frames, compressing videos into image grids, or using only a single modality. However, it remains unclear which heuristics save cost, and whether they preserve the downstream conclusions these annotations enable. To address this gap, we conduct a systematic evaluation of these heuristics using short-form videos, on two computational social science (CSS) tasks: sentiment and topic classification. We evaluate each configuration along three axes the literature typically treats separately: classification accuracy, validity of downstream inference, and per-video token cost. First, we find that accuracy and validity diverge: the highest-accuracy configuration can produce wrong conclusions. Second, modality value is not guaranteed: text alone can yield strong performance, indicating that adding modalities can add cost without adding signal. Finally, we find that cost can be decoupled from video length when annotating short-form videos: a single $2\times8$ image grid built via simple shot-transition detection approaches full-video understanding ($\kappa$ within~.05), at $\sim 15\%$ of the token cost. Based on these findings, we derive guidelines that can enable cost-aware VLM annotation in CSS.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2610.00809
Purpose: This study examines whether domain-specific public mood is associated with stock-market dynamics and whether these relationships vary across communication domains and market conditions. It distinguishes public mood from investor sentiment and investigates whether heterogeneous sources of public communication exhibit different relationships with market behaviour. Design: The study analyses 610,422 posts published by 176 curated X accounts between January 2022 and December 2023, covering Politics and Government, Economy and Finance, and Media and Society. Posts are classified using fine-tuned Turkish transformer models under three domain-specific and one pooled regime. Public mood measures are constructed at daily, weekly, and monthly frequencies and examined alongside BIST100 and BIST30 market measures using correlation, Granger causality, vector autoregression, and impulse response analyses across the full period and selected market conditions. Findings: Public mood is not associated with the direction of stock-market returns but is associated with the magnitude of price movements, particularly for Media and Society and pooled communication. These relationships become stronger at longer aggregation frequencies. Predictive relationships are concentrated in Economy and Finance communication, while their magnitude and direction vary across market conditions, particularly during the 2023 election period. The pooled measure largely reflects the most active communication domain. Originality: The study contributes to behavioral-finance research by incorporating communication - domain heterogeneity into the analysis of public mood and market dynamics. It also demonstrates how aggregating heterogeneous sources can obscure domain-specific relationships between public communication and financial markets.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.40064
With the rapid growth of Arabic NLP, several models, datasets and benchmarks have been reported. This paper asks whether approaches developed for majority languages like English can be adapted to Arabic tasks. We adapt an English aspect-based sentiment analysis framework to Arabic classification tasks and present the adaptation as BARRAC: Brainstorming Alignment and Replaced Representation learning for ArabiC tasks. BARRAC replaces consumer-review attribute pools with Arabic linguistic devices and markers for dialectal sentiment, sarcasm, and dialect identification, and replaces noisy self-training with two-stage training. Evaluated on five Arabic dialect datasets, BARRAC achieves a mean macro-F1 of 63.93\%, outperforming the best few-label SOTA by 3\%, and outperforming GPT-4o on four out of five tasks. Error analysis provides insights into remaining challenges. These results demonstrate that adapting task-specific approaches is a promising direction for Arabic NLP alongside adapting models, datasets and benchmarks.
https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.38820