arXiv Computation and Language

Answer Bubbles: Information Exposure in AI-Mediated Search

arXiv Computation and Language
2d ago

Sources of Truth: A Multi-Platform, Multilingual Audit of Citations in AI Mental Health Information Queries

arXiv:2609.00319v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Online health information seeking is shifting from keyword search, where users consider a ranked list of links, to conversational systems that compos...

By Phuong Anh Nguyen, Jill Noorily, Matthew Flathers, Haruka Notsu, Laura Ospina-Pinillos, Tommy Nguyen, Samantha Clark, Aoife Keane, Grace Thompson, John Torous
arXiv AI
Jun 2

Characterizing Web Search in The Age of Generative AI

arXiv:2510. 11560v2 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: The advent of LLMs has given rise to generative search, a new search paradigm in which LLMs retrieve information from the web related to a query and synthesize it into a single, coherent response.

By Elisabeth Kirsten, Jost Grosse Perdekamp, Qinyuan Wu, Mihir Upadhyay, Krishna P. Gummadi, Muhammad Bilal Zafar
arXiv AI
Jun 6

Retrieval-Augmented Generation Must Move Beyond Factual Grounding to Represent Diverse Opinions

arXiv:2604. 12138v2 Announce Type: replace Abstract: This position paper argues that Retrieval-Augmented Generation systems exhibit a systematic factual bias-optimizing for epistemic uncertainty reduction while ignoring the aleatoric uncertainty inherent in opinion-rich content - and that this misalignment demands a paradigm shift in retrieval system design.

By Aditya Agrawal, Alwarappan Nakkiran, Darshan Fofadiya, Alex Karlsson, Harsha Aduri
arXiv AI
2d ago

Authority Bias in Conversational Search Engines for Academic Paper Recommendation

The study examines whether large language models (LLMs) used as conversational search engines for academic literature prioritize papers based on authority signals—such as author prestige, venue, and citations—rather than content. By keeping titles and abstracts constant and manipulating authority metadata across three counterfactual conditions (original, flipped, boosted), the researchers tested eight LLMs in a single-turn, top‑1 recommendation scenario. Results reveal a substantial, directional authority bias that varies across models and is only partially mitigated by prompt-level debiasing, while also highlighting a significant say‑do gap where debiasing instructions suppress authority mentions more quickly than authority-driven flips, leading to underestimation of behavioral bias.

By Uthman Jinadu, Parsa Ghazvinian, Anjila Budathoki, Benjamin M. Ampel, Rajshekhar Sunderraman, Yi Ding