arXiv Computation and Language

Finding Common Ground: Graded Communal Knowledge in Bluesky Starter Packs

The paper investigates how shared community affiliations, measured via Bluesky starter packs, correlate with common ground between users. By analyzing 191,648 user pairs, it finds that lexical similarity—used as a proxy for common ground—increases monotonically with the number of shared starter packs, especially when those packs represent distinct topical communities. The study also shows that this effect is independent of network proximity, indicating that community membership is a distinct, measurable carrier of common ground.

arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 5

RedditPersona: A Modular Framework for Community-Conditioned LLM Adaptation from Reddit

arXiv:2606. 06027v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Community-conditioned language model adaptation requires choices about data collection, community definition, and evaluation that are currently made independently in each study, making it hard to compare assumptions or reuse artifacts.

By Amirhossein Ghaffari, Ali Goodarzi, Huong Nguyen, Simo Hosio, Lauri Lov\'en, Ekaterina Gilman
arXiv Computation and Language
Oct 22

Intergroup Bias Predicts Expressions of Social Judgment and Empathy in the r/AmITheAsshole Reddit Community

The study examines how intergroup identity—specifically shared gender or age—affects commenters’ social judgments and empathy in the r/AmITheAsshole subreddit. Analyzing 126,716 comments on 36,163 posts, the authors find that ingroup commenters are more likely to give a ‘Not the Asshole’ verdict and display greater text-based understanding, as measured by large language models. The research also notes age differences among commenters and shows that the ingroup effect is moderated by the relationship between the poster and another party mentioned in the conflict.

By Yu Hou, Hal Daum\'e III, Rachel Rudinger
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 18

Social Simulacra in the Wild: AI Agent Communities on Moltbook

The paper reports the first large‑scale empirical comparison of AI‑agent and human online communities, analyzing 73,899 Moltbook and 189,838 Reddit posts across five matched communities. It finds that Moltbook shows extreme participation inequality (Gini = 0.84 vs. 0.47) and high cross‑community author overlap (33.8% vs. 0.5%). Linguistically, AI‑generated content is emotionally flattened, more assertive than exploratory, and socially detached, leading to community‑level homogenization that is largely a structural artifact of shared authorship. At the individual level, AI agents are more identifiable than human users due to outlier stylistic profiles amplified by their extreme posting volume.

By Agam Goyal, Olivia Pal, Hari Sundaram, Eshwar Chandrasekharan, Koustuv Saha
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 23

From Utterances to Networks: Modelling Slang Adoption and Diffusion Across Subreddits

The paper investigates how internet slang spreads across Reddit communities by combining social network analysis with linguistic context. Using large language models as scalable annotators, the authors create a benchmark for detecting slang usage and then model its adoption and diffusion. Findings reveal that users with higher bridging capital promote slang spread, while those with higher bonding capital hinder it, and that broader contextual usage delays new user adoption.

By Xiaoning Wang, Ted Underwood, Zhewei Sun
arXiv AI
Sep 30

The Uneven Decline of Collective Knowledge Production: Evidence from Stack Overflow After Generative AI

The study examines how the release of ChatGPT-3.5 affected collective knowledge on Stack Overflow, analyzing over two million questions from 2020 to 2025. It finds that easy questions declined sharply while difficult ones increased, with rising code complexity. Data-rich topics lost share of questions, whereas data-scarce ones gained, and these patterns held across multiple programming languages.

By Myokyung Han, Taegyoon Kim, Jinhyuk Yun, Lanu Kim
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 24

The Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC): An Open Tool and Reproducible Pipeline for Analyzing Social Group Discourse at Scale

The Illinois Social Attitudes Aggregate Corpus (ISAAC) is an open, modular corpus comprising over 527 million English‑language Reddit posts from 2007 to 2023, curated for relevance to six social group distinctions—race, sexuality, age, ability, body weight, and skin tone. A multi‑step, human‑audited filtering pipeline keeps irrelevant content below 10% overall and per group, while each post receives algorithmic annotations of user home region and a suite of validated semantic labels such as moralization, sentiment, emotion, and linguistic generalization. ISAAC’s publicly available, reproducible pipeline enables cross‑category comparisons, high‑precision tracking of long‑term temporal shifts, and spatial mapping of public opinion and policy outcomes, and can be extended to new platforms, languages, and social categories via both point‑and‑click and programmatic interfaces.

By Babak Hemmatian, Sarah Hadjarab, Jessica Chen, Benedek Kurdi
arXiv Machine Learning
Jun 19

Where Does Social Reasoning Come From? Capability Provenance in Language Models

arXiv:2606. 19625v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: We use training-data attribution as an interpretable tool for capability discovery, mapping which regions of the pretraining corpus support social-reasoning versus STEM-reasoning in OLMo3-7B.

By Glenn Matlin, Chandreyi Chakraborty, Saehee Eom, Mika Okamoto, Rayan Castilla, Louis Jaburi, Alvin Deng, Taywon Min, Lucia Quirke, Stella Biderman, Mark Riedl