arXiv Machine Learning

Making Political Text Scaling Comparable: Infrastructure and Hyperparameter Sensitivity for 17 Algorithms

The paper argues that computational text‑based ideal point estimation (CT‑IPE) methods should be viewed as configurable measurement pipelines rather than fixed estimators. It presents a large‑scale comparative experiment involving 17 CT‑IPE algorithms, 5,537 runs, and about 4.25 million left‑right position estimates, and describes shared infrastructure that enables joint execution of these heterogeneous methods. Sensitivity analyses reveal that most algorithms exhibit low hyperparameter sensitivity (ICC < .10), with any remaining sensitivity concentrated in a few key researcher choices such as the language or embedding model, seed keyword lists, and number of topics.

arXiv AI
Sep 4

Toward Collective-Centric Evaluation of Preference Inference for Participatory Democracy

The paper examines how Preference Inference (PI) models used in large-scale participatory democracy platforms can alter the perceived consensus and minority support by predicting missing votes. It introduces a collective‑centric evaluation framework that assesses whether inferred votes maintain key properties of the overall preference landscape, rather than focusing solely on individual prediction accuracy. Using the largest multilingual dataset to date—four consultations with over 90,000 participants, 1 million votes, and 22 languages—the study finds that models with similar predictive accuracy can differ markedly in how well they preserve the collective structure, underscoring that accuracy alone is insufficient for evaluating PI in democratic contexts.

By Pierre-Antoine Lequeu, Salim Hafid, Paul Lerner, Nazanin Shafiabadi, Laur\`ene Cave, David Mas, Jean-Philippe Cointet, Benjamin Piwowarski, Fran\c{c}ois Yvon
arXiv AI
Jun 30

LLM-Ideoplasticity: Measuring Ideological Plasticity in the Political Behavior of LLMs as a Context-Conditioned Distribution

arXiv:2606. 28335v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We argue, with systematic empirical evidence, that a large language model's political ideology is not a fixed point, but a conditional distribution $\mathbb{P}($position$\mid$context$)$ over a real political space.

By Adib Sakhawat, Syed Rifat Raiyan, Tahsin Islam, Takia Farhin, Hasan Mahmud, Md Kamrul Hasan
Hugging Face Trending Papers
Jun 10

A Resource for Enthymeme Detection in Controversial Political Discourse

Enthymemes, arguments with unstated premises or conclusions, are pervasive in persuasive discourse, yet their annotation remains notoriously subjective. We present a resource of 1,482 tweets from politically controversial discourse, annotated by five annotators for the presence of enthymemes and their argument structure, designed to study label variation.

arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

When Calibration Rankings Reverse: Accuracy-Controlled Evaluation for Fair Comparison of LLMs

The paper argues that traditional global calibration metrics, such as Expected Calibration Error and Brier Score, are confounded by differences in model accuracy when comparing large language models. It introduces ACE, an accuracy‑controlled evaluation framework that offers Instance‑Aligned, Distribution‑Aligned, and Candidate‑Aligned views to provide fairer cross‑model comparisons. Experiments across various benchmarks reveal that many reported calibration advantages disappear after accuracy control and that model rankings often reverse, indicating that raw global metrics are unreliable for cross‑model calibration assessment.

By Zhichao Yang, Caiqi Zhang, Ruihan Yang, Chengzu Li, Nigel Collier, Deqing Yang
arXiv AI
Aug 18

Inference-Time Mitigation of Adversarial Political Bias in Large Language Models

arXiv:2608. 14629v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: As Large Language Models (LLMs) become the mainstay for information retrieval and summarization tasks, ensuring that they are always non-partisan and invulnerable to political bias is a critical step towards safer and more trustworthy Artificial Intelligence (AI).

By Tejaswi V. Panchagnula, Bruce Coburn, Bryce J. Dietrich, Robert X. Browning, Edward J. Delp, Fengqing Zhu