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Recent research in psycholinguistics has provided increasing evidence that humans predict upcoming content. Prediction also affects perception and might be a key to robustness in human language processing. In this paper, we investigate the…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to predict human behavior. We propose a measure for evaluating how much knowledge a pretrained LLM brings to such a prediction: its equivalent sample size, defined as the amount of…
News recommender systems (NRs) have been shown to shape public discourse and to enforce behaviors that have a critical, oftentimes detrimental effect on democracies. Earlier research on the impact of media bias has revealed their strong…
Rapid progress in machine learning for natural language processing has the potential to transform debates about how humans learn language. However, the learning environments and biases of current artificial learners and humans diverge in…
Our opinions, which things we like or dislike, depend on the opinions of those around us. Nowadays, we are influenced by the opinions of online strangers, expressed in comments and ratings on online platforms. Here, we perform novel…
The emergence of online communities has enabled firms to monitor consumer-generated online word-of-mouth (WOM) in real-time by mining publicly available information from the Internet. A prerequisite for harnessing this new ability is the…
This chapter critically examines the potential contributions of modern language models to theoretical linguistics. Despite their focus on engineering goals, these models' ability to acquire sophisticated linguistic knowledge from mere…
In spite of a growing body of scientific evidence on the effectiveness of individual face mask usage for reducing transmission rates, individual face mask usage has become a highly polarized topic within the United States. A series of…
As the adoption of language models advances, so does the need to better represent individual users to the model. Are there aspects of an individual's belief system that a language model can utilize for improved alignment? Following prior…
Opinion dynamics - the research field dealing with how people's opinions form and evolve in a social context - traditionally uses agent-based models to validate the implications of sociological theories. These models encode the causal…
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly involved in shaping public understanding on contested issues. This has led to substantial discussion about the potential of LLMs to reinforce or correct misperceptions. While existing literature…
Many social media platforms offer a mechanism for readers to react to comments, both positively and negatively, which in aggregate can be thought of as community endorsement. This paper addresses the problem of predicting community…
Opinion polls have been the bridge between public opinion and politicians in elections. However, developing surveys to disclose people's feedback with respect to economic issues is limited, expensive, and time-consuming. In recent years,…
Opinions are an integral part of how we perceive the world and each other. They shape collective action, playing a role in democratic processes, the evolution of norms, and cultural change. For decades, researchers in the social and natural…
This paper presents an unsupervised framework for jointly modeling topic content and discourse behavior in microblog conversations. Concretely, we propose a neural model to discover word clusters indicating what a conversation concerns…
In recent years, pretrained language models have revolutionized the NLP world, while achieving state of the art performance in various downstream tasks. However, in many cases, these models do not perform well when labeled data is scarce…
This paper investigates the knowledge of language models from the perspective of Bayesian epistemology. We explore how language models adjust their confidence and responses when presented with evidence with varying levels of informativeness…
Polls posted on social media have emerged in recent years as an important tool for estimating public opinion, e.g., to gauge public support for business decisions and political candidates in national elections. Here, we examine nearly two…
COVID-19 has resulted in an ongoing pandemic and as of 12 June 2020, has caused more than 7.4 million cases and over 418,000 deaths. The highly dynamic and rapidly evolving situation with COVID-19 has made it difficult to access accurate,…
Large language models (LLMs) have transformed natural language processing, yet face challenges in specialized tasks such as simulating opinions on environmental policies. This paper introduces a novel fine-tuning approach that integrates…