Reasoner Outperforms: Generative Stance Detection with Rationalization for Social Media

Stance detection is crucial for fostering a human-centric Web by analyzing user-generated content to identify biases and harmful narratives that undermine trust. With the development of Large Language Models (LLMs), existing approaches treat stance detection as a classification problem, providing robust methodologies for modeling complex group interactions and advancing capabilities in natural language tasks. However, these methods often lack interpretability, limiting their ability to offer transparent and understandable justifications for predictions. This study adopts a generative approach, where stance predictions include explicit, interpretable rationales, and integrates them into smaller language models through single-task and multitask learning. We find that incorporating reasoning into stance detection enables the smaller model (FlanT5) to outperform GPT-3.5's zero-shot performance, achieving an improvement of up to 9.57%. Moreover, our results show that reasoning capabilities enhance multitask learning performance but may reduce effectiveness in single-task settings. Crucially, we demonstrate that faithful rationales improve rationale distillation into SLMs, advancing efforts to build interpretable, trustworthy systems for addressing discrimination, fostering trust, and promoting equitable engagement on social media.

A Benchmark for Cross-Domain Argumentative Stance Classification on Social Media

Argumentative stance classification plays a key role in identifying authors' viewpoints on specific topics. However, generating diverse pairs of argumentative sentences across various domains is challenging. Existing benchmarks often come from a single domain or focus on a limited set of topics. Additionally, manual annotation for accurate labeling is time-consuming and labor-intensive. To address these challenges, we propose leveraging platform rules, readily available expert-curated content, and large language models to bypass the need for human annotation. Our approach produces a multidomain benchmark comprising 4,498 topical claims and 30,961 arguments from three sources, spanning 21 domains. We benchmark the dataset in fully supervised, zero-shot, and few-shot settings, shedding light on the strengths and limitations of different methodologies. We release the dataset and code in this study at hidden for anonymity.

Value-Based Rationales Improve Social Experience: A Multiagent Simulation Study

We propose Exanna, a framework to realize agents that incorporate values in decision making. An Exannaagent considers the values of itself and others when providing rationales for its actions and evaluating the rationales provided by others. Via multiagent simulation, we demonstrate that considering values in decision making and producing rationales, especially for norm-deviating actions, leads to (1) higher conflict resolution, (2) better social experience, (3) higher privacy, and (4) higher flexibility.

Extracting Norms from Contracts Via ChatGPT: Opportunities and Challenges

We investigate the effectiveness of ChatGPT in extracting norms from contracts. Norms provide a natural way to engineer multiagent systems by capturing how to govern the interactions between two or more autonomous parties. We extract norms of commitment, prohibition, authorization, and power, along with associated norm elements (the parties involved, antecedents, and consequents) from contracts. Our investigation reveals ChatGPT's effectiveness and limitations in norm extraction from contracts. ChatGPT demonstrates promising performance in norm extraction without requiring training or fine-tuning, thus obviating the need for annotated data, which is not generally available in this domain. However, we found some limitations of ChatGPT in extracting these norms that lead to incorrect norm extractions. The limitations include oversight of crucial details, hallucination, incorrect parsing of conjunctions, and empty norm elements. Enhanced norm extraction from contracts can foster the development of more transparent and trustworthy formal agent interaction specifications, thereby contributing to the improvement of multiagent systems.

Decision Theory-Guided Deep Reinforcement Learning for Fast Learning

This paper introduces a novel approach, Decision Theory-guided Deep Reinforcement Learning (DT-guided DRL), to address the inherent cold start problem in DRL. By integrating decision theory principles, DT-guided DRL enhances agents' initial performance and robustness in complex environments, enabling more efficient and reliable convergence during learning. Our investigation encompasses two primary problem contexts: the cart pole and maze navigation challenges. Experimental results demonstrate that the integration of decision theory not only facilitates effective initial guidance for DRL agents but also promotes a more structured and informed exploration strategy, particularly in environments characterized by large and intricate state spaces. The results of experiment demonstrate that DT-guided DRL can provide significantly higher rewards compared to regular DRL. Specifically, during the initial phase of training, the DT-guided DRL yields up to an 184% increase in accumulated reward. Moreover, even after reaching convergence, it maintains a superior performance, ending with up to 53% more reward than standard DRL in large maze problems. DT-guided DRL represents an advancement in mitigating a fundamental challenge of DRL by leveraging functions informed by human (designer) knowledge, setting a foundation for further research in this promising interdisciplinary domain.

Norm Enforcement with a Soft Touch: Faster Emergence, Happier Agents

A multiagent system can be viewed as a society of autonomous agents, whose interactions can be effectively regulated via social norms. In general, the norms of a society are not hardcoded but emerge from the agents' interactions. Specifically, how the agents in a society react to each other's behavior and respond to the reactions of others determines which norms emerge in the society. We think of these reactions by an agent to the satisfactory or unsatisfactory behaviors of another agent as communications from the first agent to the second agent. Understanding these communications is a kind of social intelligence: these communications provide natural drivers for norm emergence by pushing agents toward certain behaviors, which can become established as norms. Whereas it is well-known that sanctioning can lead to the emergence of norms, we posit that a broader kind of social intelligence can prove more effective in promoting cooperation in a multiagent system. Accordingly, we develop Nest, a framework that models social intelligence in the form of a wider variety of communications and understanding of them than in previous work. To evaluate Nest, we develop a simulated pandemic environment and conduct simulation experiments to compare Nest with baselines considering a combination of three kinds of social communication: sanction, tell, and hint. We find that societies formed of Nest agents achieve norms faster; moreover, Nest agents effectively avoid undesirable consequences, which are negative sanctions and deviation from goals, and yield higher satisfaction for themselves than baseline agents despite requiring only an equivalent amount of information.

Moral Judgments in Narratives on Reddit: Investigating Moral Sparks via Social Commonsense and Linguistic Signals

Given the increasing realism of social interactions online, social media offers an unprecedented avenue to evaluate real-life moral scenarios. We examine posts from Reddit, where authors and commenters share their moral judgments on who is blameworthy. We employ computational techniques to investigate factors influencing moral judgments, including (1) events activating social commonsense and (2) linguistic signals. To this end, we focus on excerpt-which we term moral sparks-from original posts that commenters include to indicate what motivates their moral judgments. By examining over 24,672 posts and 175,988 comments, we find that event-related negative personal traits (e.g., immature and rude) attract attention and stimulate blame, implying a dependent relationship between moral sparks and blameworthiness. Moreover, language that impacts commenters' cognitive processes to depict events and characters enhances the probability of an excerpt become a moral spark, while factual and concrete descriptions tend to inhibit this effect.

CoSiNES: Contrastive Siamese Network for Entity Standardization

Entity standardization maps noisy mentions from free-form text to standard entities in a knowledge base. The unique challenge of this task relative to other entity-related tasks is the lack of surrounding context and numerous variations in the surface form of the mentions, especially when it comes to generalization across domains where labeled data is scarce. Previous research mostly focuses on developing models either heavily relying on context, or dedicated solely to a specific domain. In contrast, we propose CoSiNES, a generic and adaptable framework with Contrastive Siamese Network for Entity Standardization that effectively adapts a pretrained language model to capture the syntax and semantics of the entities in a new domain. We construct a new dataset in the technology domain, which contains 640 technical stack entities and 6,412 mentions collected from industrial content management systems. We demonstrate that CoSiNES yields higher accuracy and faster runtime than baselines derived from leading methods in this domain. CoSiNES also achieves competitive performance in four standard datasets from the chemistry, medicine, and biomedical domains, demonstrating its cross-domain applicability.

Conversation Modeling to Predict Derailment

Conversations among online users sometimes derail, i.e., break down into personal attacks. Such derailment has a negative impact on the healthy growth of cyberspace communities. The ability to predict whether ongoing conversations are likely to derail could provide valuable real-time insight to interlocutors and moderators. Prior approaches predict conversation derailment retrospectively without the ability to forestall the derailment proactively. Some works attempt to make dynamic prediction as the conversation develops, but fail to incorporate multisource information, such as conversation structure and distance to derailment. We propose a hierarchical transformer-based framework that combines utterance-level and conversation-level information to capture fine-grained contextual semantics. We propose a domain-adaptive pretraining objective to integrate conversational structure information and a multitask learning scheme to leverage the distance from each utterance to derailment. An evaluation of our framework on two conversation derailment datasets yields improvement over F1 score for the prediction of derailment. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of incorporating multisource information.

PACO: Provocation Involving Action, Culture, and Oppression

In India, people identify with a particular group based on certain attributes such as religion. The same religious groups are often provoked against each other. Previous studies show the role of provocation in increasing tensions between India's two prominent religious groups: Hindus and Muslims. With the advent of the Internet, such provocation also surfaced on social media platforms such as WhatsApp. By leveraging an existing dataset of Indian WhatsApp posts, we identified three categories of provoking sentences against Indian Muslims. Further, we labeled 7,000 sentences for three provocation categories and called this dataset PACO. We leveraged PACO to train a model that can identify provoking sentences from a WhatsApp post. Our best model is fine-tuned RoBERTa and achieved a 0.851 average AUC score over five-fold cross-validation. Automatically identifying provoking sentences could stop provoking text from reaching out to the masses, and can prevent possible discrimination or violence against the target religious group. Further, we studied the provocative speech through a pragmatic lens, by identifying the dialog acts and impoliteness super-strategies used against the religious group.