pwc-archive/papers-with-abstracts huggingface dataset:
Computational Approaches to Understanding Large Language Model Impact on Writing and Information Ecosystems
Authors: Weixin Liang
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Language Modeling, Language Modelling, Large Language Model

Large language models (LLMs) have shown significant potential to change how we write, communicate, and create, leading to rapid adoption across society. This dissertation examines how individuals and institutions are adapting to and engaging with this emerging technology through three research directions. First, I demonstrate how the institutional adoption of AI detectors introduces systematic biases, particularly disadvantaging writers of non-dominant language varieties, highlighting critical equity concerns in AI governance. Second, I present novel population-level algorithmic approaches that measure the increasing adoption of LLMs across writing domains, revealing consistent patterns of AI-assisted content in academic peer reviews, scientific publications, consumer complaints, corporate communications, job postings, and international organization press releases. Finally, I investigate LLMs' capability to provide feedback on research manuscripts through a large-scale empirical analysis, offering insights into their potential to support researchers who face barriers in accessing timely manuscript feedback, particularly early-career researchers and those from under-resourced settings.
Leveraging LLMs to Assess Tutor Moves in Real-Life Dialogues: A Feasibility Study
Authors: Danielle R. Thomas, Conrad Borchers, Jionghao Lin, Sanjit Kakarla, Shambhavi Bhushan, Erin Gatz, Shivang Gupta, Ralph Abboud, Kenneth R. Koedinger
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Math

Tutoring improves student achievement, but identifying and studying what tutoring actions are most associated with student learning at scale based on audio transcriptions is an open research problem. This present study investigates the feasibility and scalability of using generative AI to identify and evaluate specific tutor moves in real-life math tutoring. We analyze 50 randomly selected transcripts of college-student remote tutors assisting middle school students in mathematics. Using GPT-4, GPT-4o, GPT-4-turbo, Gemini-1.5-pro, and LearnLM, we assess tutors' application of two tutor skills: delivering effective praise and responding to student math errors. All models reliably detected relevant situations, for example, tutors providing praise to students (94-98% accuracy) and a student making a math error (82-88% accuracy) and effectively evaluated the tutors' adherence to tutoring best practices, aligning closely with human judgments (83-89% and 73-77%, respectively). We propose a cost-effective prompting strategy and discuss practical implications for using large language models to support scalable assessment in authentic settings. This work further contributes LLM prompts to support reproducibility and research in AI-supported learning.
Multimodal Political Bias Identification and Neutralization
Authors: Cedric Bernard, Xavier Pleimling, Amun Kharel, Chase Vickery
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Articles

Due to the presence of political echo chambers, it becomes imperative to detect and remove subjective bias and emotionally charged language from both the text and images of political articles. However, prior work has focused on solely the text portion of the bias rather than both the text and image portions. This is a problem because the images are just as powerful of a medium to communicate information as text is. To that end, we present a model that leverages both text and image bias which consists of four different steps. Image Text Alignment focuses on semantically aligning images based on their bias through CLIP models. Image Bias Scoring determines the appropriate bias score of images via a ViT classifier. Text De-Biasing focuses on detecting biased words and phrases and neutralizing them through BERT models. These three steps all culminate to the final step of debiasing, which replaces the text and the image with neutralized or reduced counterparts, which for images is done by comparing the bias scores. The results so far indicate that this approach is promising, with the text debiasing strategy being able to identify many potential biased words and phrases, and the ViT model showcasing effective training. The semantic alignment model also is efficient. However, more time, particularly in training, and resources are needed to obtain better results. A human evaluation portion was also proposed to ensure semantic consistency of the newly generated text and images.
AI based Content Creation and Product Recommendation Applications in E-commerce: An Ethical overview
Authors: Aditi Madhusudan Jain, Ayush Jain
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Product Recommendation

As e-commerce rapidly integrates artificial intelligence for content creation and product recommendations, these technologies offer significant benefits in personalization and efficiency. AI-driven systems automate product descriptions, generate dynamic advertisements, and deliver tailored recommendations based on consumer behavior, as seen in major platforms like Amazon and Shopify. However, the widespread use of AI in e-commerce raises crucial ethical challenges, particularly around data privacy, algorithmic bias, and consumer autonomy. Bias -- whether cultural, gender-based, or socioeconomic -- can be inadvertently embedded in AI models, leading to inequitable product recommendations and reinforcing harmful stereotypes. This paper examines the ethical implications of AI-driven content creation and product recommendations, emphasizing the need for frameworks to ensure fairness, transparency, and need for more established and robust ethical standards. We propose actionable best practices to remove bias and ensure inclusivity, such as conducting regular audits of algorithms, diversifying training data, and incorporating fairness metrics into AI models. Additionally, we discuss frameworks for ethical conformance that focus on safeguarding consumer data privacy, promoting transparency in decision-making processes, and enhancing consumer autonomy. By addressing these issues, we provide guidelines for responsibly utilizing AI in e-commerce applications for content creation and product recommendations, ensuring that these technologies are both effective and ethically sound.
LLM-Based Bot Broadens the Range of Arguments in Online Discussions, Even When Transparently Disclosed as AI
Authors: Valeria Vuk, Cristina Sarasua, Fabrizio Gilardi
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00

A wide range of participation is essential for democracy, as it helps prevent the dominance of extreme views, erosion of legitimacy, and political polarization. However, engagement in online political discussions often features a limited spectrum of views due to high levels of self-selection and the tendency of online platforms to facilitate exchanges primarily among like-minded individuals. This study examines whether an LLM-based bot can widen the scope of perspectives expressed by participants in online discussions through two pre-registered randomized experiments conducted in a chatroom. We evaluate the impact of a bot that actively monitors discussions, identifies missing arguments, and introduces them into the conversation. The results indicate that our bot significantly expands the range of arguments, as measured by both objective and subjective metrics. Furthermore, disclosure of the bot as AI does not significantly alter these effects. These findings suggest that LLM-based moderation tools can positively influence online political discourse.
LLM-Generated Feedback Supports Learning If Learners Choose to Use It
Authors: Danielle R. Thomas, Conrad Borchers, Shambhavi Bhushan, Erin Gatz, Shivang Gupta, Kenneth R. Koedinger
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Selection bias

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to generate feedback, yet their impact on learning remains underexplored, especially compared to existing feedback methods. This study investigates how on-demand LLM-generated explanatory feedback influences learning in seven scenario-based tutor training lessons. Analyzing over 2,600 lesson completions from 885 tutor learners, we compare posttest performance among learners across three groups: learners who received feedback generated by gpt-3.5-turbo, those who declined it, and those without access. All groups received non-LLM corrective feedback. To address potential selection bias-where higher-performing learners may be more inclined to use LLM feedback-we applied propensity scoring. Learners with a higher predicted likelihood of engaging with LLM feedback scored significantly higher at posttest than those with lower propensity. After adjusting for this effect, two out of seven lessons showed statistically significant learning benefits from LLM feedback with standardized effect sizes of 0.28 and 0.33. These moderate effects suggest that the effectiveness of LLM feedback depends on the learners' tendency to seek support. Importantly, LLM feedback did not significantly increase completion time, and learners overwhelmingly rated it as helpful. These findings highlight LLM feedback's potential as a low-cost and scalable way to improve learning on open-ended tasks, particularly in existing systems already providing feedback without LLMs. This work contributes open datasets, LLM prompts, and rubrics to support reproducibility.
AI-based Approach in Early Warning Systems: Focus on Emergency Communication Ecosystem and Citizen Participation in Nordic Countries
Authors: Fuzel Shaik, Getnet Demil, Mourad Oussalah
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00

Climate change and natural disasters are recognized as worldwide challenges requiring complex and efficient ecosystems to deal with social, economic, and environmental effects. This chapter advocates a holistic approach, distinguishing preparedness, emergency responses, and postcrisis phases. The role of the Early Warning System (EWS), Risk modeling and mitigation measures are particularly emphasized. The chapter reviews the various Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enabler technologies that can be leveraged at each phase, focusing on the INFORM risk framework and EWSs. Emergency communication and psychological risk perception have been emphasized in emergency response times. Finally, a set of case studies from Nordic countries has been highlighted.
A Large-Scale Real-World Evaluation of LLM-Based Virtual Teaching Assistant
Authors: Sunjun Kweon, Sooyohn Nam, Hyunseung Lim, Hwajung Hong, Edward Choi
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00

Virtual Teaching Assistants (VTAs) powered by Large Language Models (LLMs) have the potential to enhance student learning by providing instant feedback and facilitating multi-turn interactions. However, empirical studies on their effectiveness and acceptance in real-world classrooms are limited, leaving their practical impact uncertain. In this study, we develop an LLM-based VTA and deploy it in an introductory AI programming course with 477 graduate students. To assess how student perceptions of the VTA's performance evolve over time, we conduct three rounds of comprehensive surveys at different stages of the course. Additionally, we analyze 3,869 student--VTA interaction pairs to identify common question types and engagement patterns. We then compare these interactions with traditional student--human instructor interactions to evaluate the VTA's role in the learning process. Through a large-scale empirical study and interaction analysis, we assess the feasibility of deploying VTAs in real-world classrooms and identify key challenges for broader adoption. Finally, we release the source code of our VTA system, fostering future advancements in AI-driven education: \texttt{https://github.com/sean0042/VTA}.
AI's Blind Spots: Geographic Knowledge and Diversity Deficit in Generated Urban Scenario
Authors: Ciro Beneduce, Massimiliano Luca, Bruno Lepri
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Diversity, Entity Disambiguation, Image Generation

Image generation models are revolutionizing many domains, and urban analysis and design is no exception. While such models are widely adopted, there is a limited literature exploring their geographic knowledge, along with the biases they embed. In this work, we generated 150 synthetic images for each state in the USA and related capitals using FLUX 1 and Stable Diffusion 3.5, two state-of-the-art models for image generation. We embed each image using DINO-v2 ViT-S/14 and the Fr\'echet Inception Distances to measure the similarity between the generated images. We found that while these models have implicitly learned aspects of USA geography, if we prompt the models to generate an image for "United States" instead of specific cities or states, the models exhibit a strong representative bias toward metropolis-like areas, excluding rural states and smaller cities. {\color{black} In addition, we found that models systematically exhibit some entity-disambiguation issues with European-sounding names like Frankfort or Devon.
Automatic Large Language Models Creation of Interactive Learning Lessons
Authors: Jionghao Lin, Jiarui Rao, Yiyang Zhao, Yuting Wang, Ashish Gurung, Amanda Barany, Jaclyn Ocumpaugh, Ryan S. Baker, Kenneth R. Koedinger
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Prompt Engineering, Retrieval-augmented Generation

We explore the automatic generation of interactive, scenario-based lessons designed to train novice human tutors who teach middle school mathematics online. Employing prompt engineering through a Retrieval-Augmented Generation approach with GPT-4o, we developed a system capable of creating structured tutor training lessons. Our study generated lessons in English for three key topics: Encouraging Students' Independence, Encouraging Help-Seeking Behavior, and Turning on Cameras, using a task decomposition prompting strategy that breaks lesson generation into sub-tasks. The generated lessons were evaluated by two human evaluators, who provided both quantitative and qualitative evaluations using a comprehensive rubric informed by lesson design research. Results demonstrate that the task decomposition strategy led to higher-rated lessons compared to single-step generation. Human evaluators identified several strengths in the LLM-generated lessons, including well-structured content and time-saving potential, while also noting limitations such as generic feedback and a lack of clarity in some instructional sections. These findings underscore the potential of hybrid human-AI approaches for generating effective lessons in tutor training.
What Is the Point of Equality in Machine Learning Fairness? Beyond Equality of Opportunity
Authors: Youjin Kong
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Fairness, Philosophy

Fairness in machine learning (ML) has become a rapidly growing area of research. But why, in the first place, is unfairness in ML morally wrong? And why should we care about improving fairness? Most fair-ML research implicitly appeals to distributive equality: the idea that desirable goods and benefits, such as opportunities (e.g., Barocas et al., 2023), should be equally distributed across society. Unfair ML models, then, are seen as wrong because they unequally distribute such benefits. This paper argues that this exclusive focus on distributive equality offers an incomplete and potentially misleading ethical foundation. Grounding ML fairness in egalitarianism -- the view that equality is a fundamental moral and social ideal -- requires challenging structural inequality: systematic, institutional, and durable arrangements that privilege some groups while disadvantaging others. Structural inequality manifests through ML systems in two primary forms: allocative harms (e.g., economic loss) and representational harms (e.g., stereotypes, erasure). While distributive equality helps address allocative harms, it fails to explain why representational harms are wrong -- why it is wrong for ML systems to reinforce social hierarchies that stratify people into superior and inferior groups -- and why ML systems should aim to foster a society where people relate as equals (i.e., relational equality). To address these limitations, the paper proposes a multifaceted egalitarian framework for ML fairness that integrates both distributive and relational equality. Drawing on critical social and political philosophy, this framework offers a more comprehensive ethical foundation for tackling the full spectrum of harms perpetuated by ML systems. The paper also outlines practical pathways for implementing the framework across the ML pipeline.
Large Language Models as Psychological Simulators: A Methodological Guide
Authors: Zhicheng Lin
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00

Large language models (LLMs) offer emerging opportunities for psychological and behavioral research, but methodological guidance is lacking. This article provides a framework for using LLMs as psychological simulators across two primary applications: simulating roles and personas to explore diverse contexts, and serving as computational models to investigate cognitive processes. For simulation, we present methods for developing psychologically grounded personas that move beyond demographic categories, with strategies for validation against human data and use cases ranging from studying inaccessible populations to prototyping research instruments. For cognitive modeling, we synthesize emerging approaches for probing internal representations, methodological advances in causal interventions, and strategies for relating model behavior to human cognition. We address overarching challenges including prompt sensitivity, temporal limitations from training data cutoffs, and ethical considerations that extend beyond traditional human subjects review. Throughout, we emphasize the need for transparency about model capabilities and constraints. Together, this framework integrates emerging empirical evidence about LLM performance--including systematic biases, cultural limitations, and prompt brittleness--to help researchers wrangle these challenges and leverage the unique capabilities of LLMs in psychological research.
From Prompts to Constructs: A Dual-Validity Framework for LLM Research in Psychology
Authors: Zhicheng Lin
Date: 2025-06-20 00:00:00
Tasks: Causal Inference

Large language models (LLMs) are rapidly being adopted across psychology, serving as research tools, experimental subjects, human simulators, and computational models of cognition. However, the application of human measurement tools to these systems can produce contradictory results, raising concerns that many findings are measurement phantoms--statistical artifacts rather than genuine psychological phenomena. In this Perspective, we argue that building a robust science of AI psychology requires integrating two of our field's foundational pillars: the principles of reliable measurement and the standards for sound causal inference. We present a dual-validity framework to guide this integration, which clarifies how the evidence needed to support a claim scales with its scientific ambition. Using an LLM to classify text may require only basic accuracy checks, whereas claiming it can simulate anxiety demands a far more rigorous validation process. Current practice systematically fails to meet these requirements, often treating statistical pattern matching as evidence of psychological phenomena. The same model output--endorsing "I am anxious"--requires different validation strategies depending on whether researchers claim to measure, characterize, simulate, or model psychological constructs. Moving forward requires developing computational analogues of psychological constructs and establishing clear, scalable standards of evidence rather than the uncritical application of human measurement tools.
Modeling Public Perceptions of Science in Media
Authors: Jiaxin Pei, Dustin Wright, Isabelle Augenstin, David Jurgens
Date: 2025-06-19 00:00:00

Effectively engaging the public with science is vital for fostering trust and understanding in our scientific community. Yet, with an ever-growing volume of information, science communicators struggle to anticipate how audiences will perceive and interact with scientific news. In this paper, we introduce a computational framework that models public perception across twelve dimensions, such as newsworthiness, importance, and surprisingness. Using this framework, we create a large-scale science news perception dataset with 10,489 annotations from 2,101 participants from diverse US and UK populations, providing valuable insights into public responses to scientific information across domains. We further develop NLP models that predict public perception scores with a strong performance. Leveraging the dataset and model, we examine public perception of science from two perspectives: (1) Perception as an outcome: What factors affect the public perception of scientific information? (2) Perception as a predictor: Can we use the estimated perceptions to predict public engagement with science? We find that individuals' frequency of science news consumption is the driver of perception, whereas demographic factors exert minimal influence. More importantly, through a large-scale analysis and carefully designed natural experiment on Reddit, we demonstrate that the estimated public perception of scientific information has direct connections with the final engagement pattern. Posts with more positive perception scores receive significantly more comments and upvotes, which is consistent across different scientific information and for the same science, but are framed differently. Overall, this research underscores the importance of nuanced perception modeling in science communication, offering new pathways to predict public interest and engagement with scientific content.
Automatic Speech Recognition Biases in Newcastle English: an Error Analysis
Authors: Dana Serditova, Kevin Tang, Jochen Steffens
Date: 2025-06-19 00:00:00
Tasks: Automatic Speech Recognition, Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR), Diversity, speech-recognition, Speech Recognition

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) systems struggle with regional dialects due to biased training which favours mainstream varieties. While previous research has identified racial, age, and gender biases in ASR, regional bias remains underexamined. This study investigates ASR performance on Newcastle English, a well-documented regional dialect known to be challenging for ASR. A two-stage analysis was conducted: first, a manual error analysis on a subsample identified key phonological, lexical, and morphosyntactic errors behind ASR misrecognitions; second, a case study focused on the systematic analysis of ASR recognition of the regional pronouns ``yous'' and ``wor''. Results show that ASR errors directly correlate with regional dialectal features, while social factors play a lesser role in ASR mismatches. We advocate for greater dialectal diversity in ASR training data and highlight the value of sociolinguistic analysis in diagnosing and addressing regional biases.