Upcoming Talk @ CRA Grad Cohort, Denver 2025 on Capturing Human Cognitive Styles with Language -- Towards an Experimental Evaluation Paradigm.
Oct 15, 2024ยท,,,,,,ยท
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Vasudha Varadarajan
Syeda Mahwish
Xiaoran Liu
Julia Buffolino
Christian C. Luhmann
Ryan L. Boyd
H Andrew Schwartz

Abstract
While NLP models often seek to capture cognitive states via language, the validity of predicted states is determined by comparing them to annotations created without access the cognitive states of the authors. In behavioral sciences, cognitive states are instead measured via experiments. Here, we introduce an experiment-based framework for evaluating language-based cognitive style models against human behavior. We explore the phenomenon of decision making, and its relationship to the linguistic style of an individual talking about a recent decision they made. The participants then follow a classical decision-making experiment that captures their cognitive style, determined by how preferences change during a decision exercise. We find that language features, intended to capture cognitive style, can predict participants’ decision style with moderate-to-high accuracy (AUC ~ 0.8), demonstrating that cognitive style can be partly captured and revealed by discourse patterns.
Type
Publication
Under Review at ACL-ARR October 2024