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Snigdha Chaturvedi

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Published work

9 published item(s)

preprint2026arXiv

Do LLM Agents Mirror Socio-Cognitive Effects in Power-Asymmetric Conversations?

Power differences shape human communication through well documented socio cognitive effects, including language coordination, pronoun usage, authority bias, and harmful compliance. We examine whether large language models (LLMs) exhibit similar behaviors when assigned high or low status personas. Using personas from diverse professions, we simulate multi turn, power asymmetric dialogues (e.g., principal teacher, justice lawyer) and measure (i) linguistic coordination, (ii) pronoun usage, (iii) persuasion success, and (iv) compliance with unsafe requests. Our results show that LLMs show key socio cognitive effects of power, albeit with nuances and variability, linking simulated interactions to both desirable and unsafe behaviors.

preprint2026arXiv

Socratic Students: Teaching Language Models to Learn by Asking Questions

Large language Models (LLMs) are usually used to answer questions, but many high-stakes applications (e.g., tutoring, clinical support) require the complementary skill of asking questions: detecting missing information, requesting clarifications, and using them to solve tasks. We study this skill in reasoning-heavy domains where progress depends on inquiry rather than factual recall. We define an interactive protocol where a student model engages a stronger teacher under a small turn budget. After each teacher reply, we evaluate the student on the original task with Pass@k. We propose Outcome-Driven Question optimization Strategy (ODQS ), a training framework that learns a questioning policy from downstream task outcomes. At each turn, we sample multiple candidate questions; query the teacher with each, then score the student's resulting performance. Using these scores, we train the student via supervised fine-tuning followed by Direct Preference Optimization (DPO), without any human labels. On GSM8K, HumanEval, and OpenCoder, ODQS produces large gains over interactive baselines, boosting Pass@5 by up to 54.7% (absolute) on math and 22.9% (absolute) on coding, and matching baseline performance in three fewer turns. Thus, question asking can be explicitly trained from task outcomes, improving both accuracy and efficiency in interactive reasoning.

preprint2022arXiv

Learning Fair Representations via Rate-Distortion Maximization

Text representations learned by machine learning models often encode undesirable demographic information of the user. Predictive models based on these representations can rely on such information, resulting in biased decisions. We present a novel debiasing technique, Fairness-aware Rate Maximization (FaRM), that removes protected information by making representations of instances belonging to the same protected attribute class uncorrelated, using the rate-distortion function. FaRM is able to debias representations with or without a target task at hand. FaRM can also be adapted to remove information about multiple protected attributes simultaneously. Empirical evaluations show that FaRM achieves state-of-the-art performance on several datasets, and learned representations leak significantly less protected attribute information against an attack by a non-linear probing network.

preprint2022arXiv

Read Top News First: A Document Reordering Approach for Multi-Document News Summarization

A common method for extractive multi-document news summarization is to re-formulate it as a single-document summarization problem by concatenating all documents as a single meta-document. However, this method neglects the relative importance of documents. We propose a simple approach to reorder the documents according to their relative importance before concatenating and summarizing them. The reordering makes the salient content easier to learn by the summarization model. Experiments show that our approach outperforms previous state-of-the-art methods with more complex architectures.

preprint2022arXiv

Revisiting Generative Commonsense Reasoning: A Pre-Ordering Approach

Pre-trained models (PTMs) have lead to great improvements in natural language generation (NLG). However, it is still unclear how much commonsense knowledge they possess. With the goal of evaluating commonsense knowledge of NLG models, recent work has proposed the problem of generative commonsense reasoning, e.g., to compose a logical sentence given a set of unordered concepts. Existing approaches to this problem hypothesize that PTMs lack sufficient parametric knowledge for this task, which can be overcome by introducing external knowledge or task-specific pre-training objectives. Different from this trend, we argue that PTM's inherent ability for generative commonsense reasoning is underestimated due to the order-agnostic property of its input. In particular, we hypothesize that the order of the input concepts can affect the PTM's ability to utilize its commonsense knowledge. To this end, we propose a pre-ordering approach to elaborately manipulate the order of the given concepts before generation. Experiments show that our approach can outperform the more sophisticated models that have access to a lot of external data and resources.

preprint2022arXiv

Unsupervised Extractive Opinion Summarization Using Sparse Coding

Opinion summarization is the task of automatically generating summaries that encapsulate information from multiple user reviews. We present Semantic Autoencoder (SemAE) to perform extractive opinion summarization in an unsupervised manner. SemAE uses dictionary learning to implicitly capture semantic information from the review and learns a latent representation of each sentence over semantic units. A semantic unit is supposed to capture an abstract semantic concept. Our extractive summarization algorithm leverages the representations to identify representative opinions among hundreds of reviews. SemAE is also able to perform controllable summarization to generate aspect-specific summaries. We report strong performance on SPACE and AMAZON datasets, and perform experiments to investigate the functioning of our model. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/brcsomnath/SemAE.

preprint2015arXiv

Ask, and shall you receive?: Understanding Desire Fulfillment in Natural Language Text

The ability to comprehend wishes or desires and their fulfillment is important to Natural Language Understanding. This paper introduces the task of identifying if a desire expressed by a subject in a given short piece of text was fulfilled. We propose various unstructured and structured models that capture fulfillment cues such as the subject's emotional state and actions. Our experiments with two different datasets demonstrate the importance of understanding the narrative and discourse structure to address this task.

preprint2015arXiv

Inferring Interpersonal Relations in Narrative Summaries

Characterizing relationships between people is fundamental for the understanding of narratives. In this work, we address the problem of inferring the polarity of relationships between people in narrative summaries. We formulate the problem as a joint structured prediction for each narrative, and present a model that combines evidence from linguistic and semantic features, as well as features based on the structure of the social community in the text. We also provide a clustering-based approach that can exploit regularities in narrative types. e.g., learn an affinity for love-triangles in romantic stories. On a dataset of movie summaries from Wikipedia, our structured models provide more than a 30% error-reduction over a competitive baseline that considers pairs of characters in isolation.

preprint2015arXiv

Modeling Dynamic Relationships Between Characters in Literary Novels

Studying characters plays a vital role in computationally representing and interpreting narratives. Unlike previous work, which has focused on inferring character roles, we focus on the problem of modeling their relationships. Rather than assuming a fixed relationship for a character pair, we hypothesize that relationships are dynamic and temporally evolve with the progress of the narrative, and formulate the problem of relationship modeling as a structured prediction problem. We propose a semi-supervised framework to learn relationship sequences from fully as well as partially labeled data. We present a Markovian model capable of accumulating historical beliefs about the relationship and status changes. We use a set of rich linguistic and semantically motivated features that incorporate world knowledge to investigate the textual content of narrative. We empirically demonstrate that such a framework outperforms competitive baselines.