Bridging is an anaphoric phenomenon where the referent of an entity in a discourse is dependent on a previous, non-identical entity for interpretation, such as in "There is 'a house'. 'The door' is red," where the door is specifically understood to be the door of the aforementioned house. While there are several existing resources in English for bridging anaphora, most are small, provide limited coverage of the phenomenon, and/or provide limited genre coverage. In this paper, we introduce GUMBridge, a new resource for bridging, which includes 16 diverse genres of English, providing both broad coverage for the phenomenon and granular annotations for the subtype categorization of bridging varieties. We also present an evaluation of annotation quality and report on baseline performance using open and closed source contemporary LLMs on three tasks underlying our data, showing that bridging resolution and subtype classification remain difficult NLP tasks in the age of LLMs.

Organization's communication is essential for public trust, but the rise of generative AI models has introduced significant challenges by generating persuasive content that can form competing narratives with official messages from government and commercial organizations at speed and scale. This has left agencies in a reactive position, often unaware of how these models construct their persuasive strategies, making it more difficult to sustain communication effectiveness. In this paper, we introduce a large LLM-generated persuasion attack dataset, which includes 134,136 attacks generated by GPT-4, Gemma 2, and Llama 3.1 on agency news. These attacks span 23 persuasive techniques from SemEval 2023 Task 3, directed toward 972 press releases from ten agencies. The generated attacks come in two mediums, press release statements and social media posts, covering both long-form and short-form communication strategies. We analyzed the moral resonance of these persuasion attacks to understand their attack vectors. GPT-4's attacks mainly focus on Care, with Authority and Loyalty also playing a role. Gemma 2 emphasizes Care and Authority, while Llama 3.1 centers on Loyalty and Care. Analyzing LLM-generated persuasive attacks across models will enable proactive defense, allow to create the reputation armor for organizations, and propel the development of both effective and resilient communications in the information ecosystem.

When large language models (LLMs) are aligned to a specific online community, do they exhibit generalizable behavioral patterns that mirror that community's attitudes and responses to new uncertainty, or are they simply recalling patterns from training data? We introduce a framework to test epistemic stance transfer: targeted deletion of event knowledge, validated with multiple probes, followed by evaluation of whether models still reproduce the community's organic response patterns under ignorance. Using Russian--Ukrainian military discourse and U.S. partisan Twitter data, we find that even after aggressive fact removal, aligned LLMs maintain stable, community-specific behavioral patterns for handling uncertainty. These results provide evidence that alignment encodes structured, generalizable behaviors beyond surface mimicry. Our framework offers a systematic way to detect behavioral biases that persist under ignorance, advancing efforts toward safer and more transparent LLM deployments.

Analyzing spoken discourse is a valid means of quantifying language ability in persons with aphasia. There are many ways to quantify discourse, one common way being to evaluate the informativeness of the discourse. That is, given the total number of words produced, how many of those are context-relevant and accurate. This type of analysis is called Correct Information Unit (CIU) analysis and is one of the most prevalent discourse analyses used by speech-language pathologists (SLPs). Despite this, CIU analysis in the clinic remains limited due to the manual labor needed by SLPs to code and analyze collected speech. Recent advances in machine learning (ML) seek to augment such labor by automating modeling of propositional, macrostructural, pragmatic, and multimodal dimensions of discourse. To that end, this study evaluated five ML models for reliable identification of Correct Information Units (CIUs, Nicholas & Brookshire, 1993), during a picture description task. The five supervised ML models were trained using randomly selected human-coded transcripts and accompanying words and CIUs from persons with aphasia. The baseline model training produced a high accuracy across transcripts for word vs non-word, with all models achieving near perfect performance (0.995) with high AUC range (0.914 min, 0.995 max). In contrast, CIU vs non-CIU showed a greater variability, with the k-nearest neighbor (k-NN) model the highest accuracy (0.824) and second highest AUC (0.787). These findings indicate that while the supervised ML models can distinguish word from not word, identifying CIUs is challenging.

In this work, we study English-language vaccine discourse in social media posts, specifically posts on X (formerly Twitter), in seven years before the COVID-19 outbreak (2013 to 2019) and three years after the outbreak was first reported (2020 to 2022). Drawing on theories from social cognition and the stereotype content model in Social Psychology, we analyze how English speakers talk about vaccines on social media to understand the evolving narrative around vaccines in social media posts. To do that, we first introduce a novel dataset comprising 18.7 million curated posts on vaccine discourse from 2013 to 2022. This extensive collection-filtered down from an initial 129 million posts through rigorous preprocessing-captures both pre-COVID and COVID-19 periods, offering valuable insights into the evolution of English-speaking X users' perceptions related to vaccines. Our analysis shows that the COVID-19 pandemic led to complex shifts in X users' sentiment and discourse around vaccines. We observe that negative emotion word usage decreased during the pandemic, with notable rises in usage of surprise, and trust related emotion words. Furthermore, vaccine-related language tended to use more warmth-focused words associated with trustworthiness, along with positive, competence-focused words during the early days of the pandemic, with a marked rise in negative word usage towards the end of the pandemic, possibly reflecting a growing vaccine hesitancy and skepticism.

Assessing the quality of group deliberation is essential for improving our understanding of deliberative processes. The Deliberative Reason Index (DRI) offers a sophisticated metric for evaluating group reasoning, but its implementation has been constrained by the complex and time-consuming process of statement generation. This thesis introduces an innovative, automated approach to DRI statement generation that leverages advanced natural language processing (NLP) and large language models (LLMs) to substantially reduce the human effort involved in survey preparation. Key contributions are a systematic framework for automated DRI statement generation and a methodological innovation that significantly lowers the barrier to conducting comprehensive deliberative process assessments. In addition, the findings provide a replicable template for integrating generative artificial intelligence into social science research methodologies.

Shaping inclusive representations that embrace diversity and ensure fair participation and reflections of values is at the core of many conversation-based models. However, many existing methods rely on surface inclusion using mention of user demographics or behavioral attributes of social groups. Such methods overlook the nuanced, implicit expression of opinion embedded in conversations. Furthermore, the over-reliance on overt cues can exacerbate misalignment and reinforce harmful or stereotypical representations in model outputs. Thus, we took a step back and recognized that equitable inclusion needs to account for the implicit expression of opinion and use the stance of responses to validate the normative alignment. This study aims to evaluate how opinions are represented in NLP or computational models by introducing an alignment evaluation framework that foregrounds implicit, often overlooked conversations and evaluates the normative social views and discourse. Our approach models the stance of responses as a proxy for the underlying opinion, enabling a considerate and reflective representation of diverse social viewpoints. We evaluate the framework using both (i) positive-unlabeled (PU) online learning with base classifiers, and (ii) instruction-tuned language models to assess post-training alignment. Through this, we provide a principled and structured lens on how implicit opinions are (mis)represented and offer a pathway toward more inclusive model behavior.

Rhetorical modes are useful in both academic and non-academic writing, and can be subjects to be studied within linguistic research and computational modeling. Establishing a conceptual bridge among these domains could enable each to benefit from the others. This paper proposes duality-based mode operations (split-unite, forward-backward, expansion-reduction and orthogonal dualities) to expand the set of rhetorical modes, introducing generated modes like combination and generalization, thereby enhancing epistemic diversity across multiple applications. It further presents a pyramid multilayer mapping framework (e.g., three layers from the rhetorical model layer, to cognitive layer, and to epistemic layers) that reduces the resulting cognitive complexity. The degrees of expressive diversity and complexity reduction are quantified through binomial combinatorics and Shannon entropy analysis. A Marginal Rhetorical Bit (MRB) is identified, permitting the definition of a rhetorical-scalable parameter that measures expressive growth speed in bits per stage. A direct entropy measure shows that hierarchical selection over smaller subsets markedly reduces choice uncertainty compared with flat selection across all modes. These considerations appear to transform static and non-measurable rhetorical taxonomies into more dynamic and more measurable systems for discourse design. From this work, it would be possible to identify a pathway for future AI systems to operate not only on language tokens but on layered rhetorical reasoning structures, bridging linguistic, pedagogical, academic, and computational research

Quantifying human flourishing, a multidimensional construct including happiness, health, purpose, virtue, relationships, and financial stability, is critical for understanding societal well-being beyond economic indicators. Existing measures often lack fine spatial and temporal resolution. Here we introduce the Human Flourishing Geographic Index (HFGI), derived from analyzing approximately 2.6 billion geolocated U.S. tweets (2013-2023) using fine-tuned large language models to classify expressions across 48 indicators aligned with Harvard's Global Flourishing Study framework plus attitudes towards migration and perception of corruption. The dataset offers monthly and yearly county- and state-level indicators of flourishing-related discourse, validated to confirm that the measures accurately represent the underlying constructs and show expected correlations with established indicators. This resource enables multidisciplinary analyses of well-being, inequality, and social change at unprecedented resolution, offering insights into the dynamics of human flourishing as reflected in social media discourse across the United States over the past decade.

Objective and scalable measurement of teaching quality is a persistent challenge in education. While Large Language Models (LLMs) offer potential, general-purpose models have struggled to reliably apply complex, authentic classroom observation instruments. This paper uses custom LLMs built on sentence-level embeddings, an architecture better suited for the long-form, interpretive nature of classroom transcripts than conventional subword tokenization. We systematically evaluate five different sentence embeddings under a data-efficient training regime designed to prevent overfitting. Our results demonstrate that these specialized models can achieve human-level and even super-human performance with expert human ratings above 0.65 and surpassing the average human-human rater correlation. Further, through analysis of annotation context windows, we find that more advanced models-those better aligned with human judgments-attribute a larger share of score variation to lesson-level features rather than isolated utterances, challenging the sufficiency of single-turn annotation paradigms. Finally, to assess external validity, we find that aggregate model scores align with teacher value-added measures, indicating they are capturing features relevant to student learning. However, this trend does not hold at the individual item level, suggesting that while the models learn useful signals, they have not yet achieved full generalization. This work establishes a viable and powerful new methodology for AI-driven instructional measurement, offering a path toward providing scalable, reliable, and valid feedback for educator development.