Talking Point based Ideological Discourse Analysis in News Events

Analyzing ideological discourse even in the age of LLMs remains a challenge, as these models often struggle to capture the key elements that shape real-world narratives. Specifically, LLMs fail to focus on characteristic elements driving dominant discourses and lack the ability to integrate contextual information required for understanding abstract ideological views. To address these limitations, we propose a framework motivated by the theory of ideological discourse analysis to analyze news articles related to real-world events. Our framework represents the news articles using a relational structure - talking points, which captures the interaction between entities, their roles, and media frames along with a topic of discussion. It then constructs a vocabulary of repeating themes - prominent talking points, that are used to generate ideology-specific viewpoints (or partisan perspectives). We evaluate our framework's ability to generate these perspectives through automated tasks - ideology and partisan classification tasks, supplemented by human validation. Additionally, we demonstrate straightforward applicability of our framework in creating event snapshots, a visual way of interpreting event discourse. We release resulting dataset and model to the community to support further research.

Constrained Decoding with Speculative Lookaheads

Constrained decoding with lookahead heuristics (CDLH) is a highly effective method for aligning LLM generations to human preferences. However, the extensive lookahead roll-out operations for each generated token makes CDLH prohibitively expensive, resulting in low adoption in practice. In contrast, common decoding strategies such as greedy decoding are extremely efficient, but achieve very low constraint satisfaction. We propose constrained decoding with speculative lookaheads (CDSL), a technique that significantly improves upon the inference efficiency of CDLH without experiencing the drastic performance reduction seen with greedy decoding. CDSL is motivated by the recently proposed idea of speculative decoding that uses a much smaller draft LLM for generation and a larger target LLM for verification. In CDSL, the draft model is used to generate lookaheads which is verified by a combination of target LLM and task-specific reward functions. This process accelerates decoding by reducing the computational burden while maintaining strong performance. We evaluate CDSL in two constraint decoding tasks with three LLM families and achieve 2.2x to 12.15x speedup over CDLH without significant performance reduction.

A Synthetic Prediction Market for Estimating Confidence in Published Work

Explainably estimating confidence in published scholarly work offers opportunity for faster and more robust scientific progress. We develop a synthetic prediction market to assess the credibility of published claims in the social and behavioral sciences literature. We demonstrate our system and detail our findings using a collection of known replication projects. We suggest that this work lays the foundation for a research agenda that creatively uses AI for peer review.

Predicting the Reproducibility of Social and Behavioral Science Papers Using Supervised Learning Models

In recent years, significant effort has been invested verifying the reproducibility and robustness of research claims in social and behavioral sciences (SBS), much of which has involved resource-intensive replication projects. In this paper, we investigate prediction of the reproducibility of SBS papers using machine learning methods based on a set of features. We propose a framework that extracts five types of features from scholarly work that can be used to support assessments of reproducibility of published research claims. Bibliometric features, venue features, and author features are collected from public APIs or extracted using open source machine learning libraries with customized parsers. Statistical features, such as p-values, are extracted by recognizing patterns in the body text. Semantic features, such as funding information, are obtained from public APIs or are extracted using natural language processing models. We analyze pairwise correlations between individual features and their importance for predicting a set of human-assessed ground truth labels. In doing so, we identify a subset of 9 top features that play relatively more important roles in predicting the reproducibility of SBS papers in our corpus. Results are verified by comparing performances of 10 supervised predictive classifiers trained on different sets of features.

Design and Analysis of a Synthetic Prediction Market using Dynamic Convex Sets

We present a synthetic prediction market whose agent purchase logic is defined using a sigmoid transformation of a convex semi-algebraic set defined in feature space. Asset prices are determined by a logarithmic scoring market rule. Time varying asset prices affect the structure of the semi-algebraic sets leading to time-varying agent purchase rules. We show that under certain assumptions on the underlying geometry, the resulting synthetic prediction market can be used to arbitrarily closely approximate a binary function defined on a set of input data. We also provide sufficient conditions for market convergence and show that under certain instances markets can exhibit limit cycles in asset spot price. We provide an evolutionary algorithm for training agent parameters to allow a market to model the distribution of a given data set and illustrate the market approximation using two open source data sets. Results are compared to standard machine learning methods.