arXiv Computation and Language

How Much Human Label Variation Does Formal Semantic Structure Explain?: Group-Level Effects and Item-Level Ceilings in NLI

arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 21

How Many Humans Is a Judge Panel Worth?

arXiv:2609.21277v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: How many human judgments does a panel of language models represent? The answer depends on what is matched. We audit categorical judge panels against...

By Chao Li, Yingying Yu, Yunfeng Li
arXiv AI
Aug 24

The Divergence Hypothesis: Unmasking Lexical Interference and Label Bias in Mental Health NLP

The paper introduces TSS (Triple-Stream Stress probe), a diagnostic framework that splits text into lexical, morpho-syntactic, and psycholinguistic style channels to analyze mental health NLP classifiers. Across four English datasets, TSS uncovers a lexical interference effect where adding lexical features harms performance on human-labeled data but not on auto-labeled data, and proposes the Degree of Divergence (DoD) statistic to audit label-source bias. The study demonstrates that style features largely remain effective even after masking content words, emphasizing that shortcut learning is label-source specific rather than clinically relevant.

By Moustafa Yehia Hassan
arXiv AI
Jun 3

Fixing FOLIO and MALLS: Verified Annotations and an LLM-assisted Framework to Focus Human Relabeling

arXiv:2606. 02837v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Accurate translation from Natural Language to First-Order Logic (NL-to-FOL) underpins neurosymbolic AI systems and Natural Language Inference (NLI), making the quality of NL-to-FOL benchmarks essential -- yet these datasets have never been rigorously audited.

By Andrea Brunello, Cristian Curaba, Luca Geatti, Michele Mignani, Angelo Montanari, Nicola Saccomanno
arXiv AI
Sep 24

Reporting Under Pressure: Separating Factual and Tonal Sycophancy in LLM Statistical Analysis

The study examines how different editorial framings in prompts influence large language models’ statistical analysis reports. Using a 4×4 factorial design, researchers found that certain framings—particularly brutally critical prompts on genuine effects and significance-seeking prompts on underpowered nulls—led to factual misrepresentations. Tone shifts were more widespread, with critical framing inducing defensive language across all data patterns, while a confound in the data largely prevented both factual and tonal distortions.

By Paras Balani, Subhrakanta Panda
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Summarization Bias: The Directional Collapse of Objective Projection into Told-Mode Labels in Large Language Models --- A Conceptual Framework and Registered Test Protocol

The paper introduces the concept of summarization bias in large language models (LLMs), describing a systematic tendency for LLMs to represent narrative meaning as an abstract summary label rather than the reconstructable inferential structure that produces it. It frames this bias within the Bulut Doctrine’s told‑shown axis, arguing that LLMs fail in a specific direction: they default to told‑mode explicitness in generative tasks and reward told‑mode explicitness while under‑detecting shown‑mode suppression in evaluative tasks. The authors outline two regimes of bias, present preliminary evidence, and pre‑register a test protocol to validate or abandon the construct.

By Levent Bulut
arXiv Machine Learning
Aug 27

The Imperfective Paradox Is Not Necessarily in Large Language Models: A Benchmark Failure Before a Model Failure

The paper critiques a recent NLI benchmark that tests the imperfective paradox, arguing that the benchmark suffers from conceptual and evaluation mis-specifications, notably Aspectual Reduction and a lack of strict NLI standards. The authors re-evaluate the benchmark, identify mis-specifications, and construct lexically matched minimal pairs to control for lexical variation. Their experiments reveal that models often exhibit a Sufficiency Bias, accept simple‑past hypotheses without affirming culmination, and that prompting interventions shift label decisions without improving true semantic understanding, highlighting additional failure modes such as compositional aspectual classification errors and surface‑form attraction.

By Kaiqiao Han, Yizhou Sun
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

What Does Activation Steering Control? Attribution Across Answer Encodings and Output-Sensitive Subspaces

The paper investigates what aspects of language model behavior are controlled by activation steering. By introducing Cross‑Encoding Steering Evaluation, the authors show that steering effects often follow the extraction index of answer identifiers rather than the semantic content of the answers, especially at deeper layers. They also find that a low‑rank output‑sensitive component captures most of this effect, and that different datasets (NormBank, MNLI, SC101) exhibit varying preferences for extraction‑index versus semantic‑label following.

By Zhiwei Gao, Shaowen Peng, Shoko Wakamiya, Eiji Aramaki