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natural language processing

2,926 papers

#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Generating Clinical Vignettes that Preserve Cognitive Formulations

Results show that cognitive formulation can serve as an auditable specification for scalable synthetic clinical text generation and show that cognitive formulation can serve as an auditable specification for scalable synthetic clinical text generation.

Amit Oren, N. Hertz-Palmor, Dean Ariel et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Beyond Fluency: A Rubric-Based Benchmark for Evaluating Saudi Dialect and Cultural Competence in Large Language Models

Large language models are increasingly deployed in Arabic-speaking markets, yet standard benchmarks overwhelmingly reward Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) fluency while leaving dialectal and culturally grounded competence unmeasured. This gap is consequential: everyday Arabic is largely dialectal, and dialect encodes social meaning that MSA-centric evaluation cannot capture. We present a rubric-based benchmark for the Saudi dialect, comprising 31 expert-authored prompts spanning idiomatic, pragmatic, lexical, and culturally-embedded phenomena, each paired with an expert-established ground truth. Our methodology separates evaluation into a model-agnostic phase, in which atomic, MECE positive criteria are derived solely from the ground truth, and a model-specific phase, in which four state-of-the-art systems -- Claude Opus 5, Gemini 3.7, GPT-5.6, and Kimi K3 -- are scored against those criteria and penalised for errors they actively introduce. Across 124 model-prompt evaluations we catalogue 466 error instances under a nine-category taxonomy. The four systems cluster within a narrow macro-average band (42.7%-53.1%), with no model exceeding 55% and every model recording at least one negative-scoring prompt, confirming that Saudi dialectal competence remains broadly unsolved. Notably, Ambiguous Framing is the dominant failure mode (37.3% of errors) while outright Hallucination accounts for only 11.2%, indicating that models fail less by stating falsehoods than by distorting register and flattening pragmatic nuance. We further observe a consistency-versus-ceiling trade-off and model-distinctive error signatures. We release the full prompt set, ground truths, and scored rubrics to support reproducible dialectal evaluation.

Ghassan Al-Sumaidaee, Sajjad Abdoli, Ahmed Rashad et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

DataFoundry: Evolving Data Preparators via Recursive Self-Improvement

Domain adaptation of large language models increasingly depends on constructing high-quality training data, yet existing data-preparation pipelines typically address quality only after generation through post-hoc filtering. This creates a fundamental mismatch: data-quality issues often originate from the construction process itself, while quality control is applied only to its outputs. We introduce \textsc{DataFoundry}, a framework for \textbf{evolving data preparators through recursive self-improvement} before large-scale data production. \textsc{DataFoundry} represents a data preparator as an evolvable runtime specification and instantiates its evolution with a \textsc{Skills-as-Modules} architecture, in which a central \textsc{Controller} orchestrates modular skills to compile executable runtimes, diagnose deficiencies on small pilot sets using domain-appropriate criteria, and translate diagnostic feedback into adapters that revise individual preparation components while preserving stable interfaces. We evaluate \textsc{DataFoundry} on DataPrep-Bench across mathematics, finance, law, and medicine, and find that recursively evolved preparators produce training data with higher downstream utility than baselines. Experiments across different backbones further demonstrate that these improvements are not tied to a particular model, while analyses and case studies further reveal the framework's optimization dynamics and illustrate how its evolution unfolds in practice.

Cehao Yang, Xiao-Jun Wu, Xueyuan Lin et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

Generative vs. Encoder Models for Multilingual NER: A Comprehensive Empirical Study on Naamapadam

Language is humanity's most consequential technology, yet for over a billion speakers across India's twenty-two constitutionally recognised languages, its digital layer remains structurally incomplete. Named Entity Recognition (NER), the foundational step in transforming raw text into machine-interpretable knowledge, has been studied exhaustively for English but remains largely unsolved across most Indic languages. This paper presents a rigorous comparative study of generative and encoder-based neural architectures for NER on all eleven languages of the Naamapadam benchmark. We evaluate five classic model families spanning sequence-to-sequence transformers and multilingual encoders; four decoder-only large language models (LLMs) fine-tuned with LoRA and 4-bit NF4 quantisation; and nine generative models in zero-to-5-shot inference. Under strict CoNLL span-level evaluation, encoder-based models (mBERT and XLM-R, both F1=0.675 on Hindi) substantially outperform every generative architecture in ten of eleven languages, with gaps of 7.5-40 percentage points against the strongest competitor (Gemma-2-2B: avg F1=0.427). The best few-shot result reaches only 28% of the encoder baseline. We identify three language clusters--encoder-dominant, partial-coverage, and failure-zone; and provide actionable deployment guidelines grounded in transfer learning and low-resource NLP principles.

Jakkala Mahesh, Jatavath Shravan Kumar, K. Shivani et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Sep 2026

Detecting Hidden Chain-of-Thought in Large Language Models with Linguistic, Behavioral, and Mechanistic Indicators

Large language models often answer complex reasoning questions without revealing intermediate steps, raising whether they reason latently or complete patterns. We propose the Hidden CoT Detection Score (HCDS), a comparative behavioral and mechanistic signal measuring whether neutral-prompt behavior aligns more closely with explicit CoT or explicit no- CoT. Here, hidden CoT operationally denotes this neutral-prompt CoT-like alignment; HCDS does not directly observe or prove an unexposed reasoning trace. On GSM8K, HCDS is significantly positive for both Qwen3-4B variants (Thinking $+1.87$, $p = 1.2 \times 10^{-7}$; Instruct $+1.41$, $p = 1.9 \times 10^{-4}$), replicates across a different inference stack and quantization within $0.08$ ($+1.80$ and $+1.45$), and is not significantly positive in seven of eight length-adjusted calibration-control cells. The unadjusted score produces large positive scores on single-step arithmetic and numeric factual lookup. The variants also respond differently to no-CoT instructions: Instruct complies from the prompt alone, whereas Thinking continues reasoning and requires intervention. These findings show stronger, less prompt-conditional CoT-like behavior in the reasoning-tuned model, consistent with but not proof of latent reasoning. HCDS thus investigates latent reasoning without relying on models' self-reported traces.

Armaan Singh, Ryan Trinh Le, Jasmine Kaur et al. · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Open access Sep 2026

How Prolific Sellers Self-Present: Dissecting the Communication Patterns of 1.6 Million Reverb Listings

The current paper draws on self-presentation theory and warranting theory to evaluate how the language patterns in an online marketplace reflect seller status (i.e., a prolific seller versus an everyday seller). Using 1.6 million musical instrument listings from Reverb.com in search of content, style, and structural differences in seller product descriptions, the evidence suggested prolific sellers tend to focus more on objective and functional aspects of a product (e.g., its features and specifications) and less on subjective characteristics like tone, relative to everyday sellers. Prolific sellers also communicated in a more narrative-like style, which was driven by an elevated use of personal pronouns, and they used longer descriptions than everyday sellers. Therefore, what prolific sellers focus on tends to be quite technical, but how they communicate this information is typical of a story that is told to potential buyers. Implications for self-presentation theory and warranting theory are discussed.

David M. Markowitz · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

XQDT: eXplainable and Quantitative Data-Text Alignment Metric with Feedback Signals

Evaluating data-text alignment remains challenging: existing metrics often provide limited explanations for the scores, while prompt-based LLM-as-Judge methods can be expensive and unreliable. We present an end-to-end explainable evaluation metric that fine-tunes a language model to identify omitted, extra, incorrect, and correct data units in a data-text pair. These local judgements are aggregated into precision, recall, and F1 scores, providing both fine-grained diagnostic feedback and an interpretable measure of alignment quality. Across benchmarks, our fine-tuned models outperform LLM-as-Judge methods in error prediction and achieve competitive precision, recall, and F1 scores, while maintaining strong correlation with human judgements. Beyond evaluation, our verifier outputs also provide useful feedback signals for downstream correction and refinement, supporting alignment-oriented improvement of data-to-text and text-to-data. Code and resources are available at https://github.com/guihuzhang/xqdt.

Kun Efimov-Zhang, Yifei Song, Claire Gardent · 0 citations
#natural language process... Preprint Aug 2026

Token Counts Are Not Model Lineage: A Frozen-Threshold Holdout Study of Black-Box LLM API Fingerprinting

Black-box model attribution is increasingly relevant when large language models (LLMs) are served through relay and reseller APIs. A tempting low-cost signal is the prompt-token count returned by an OpenAI-compatible endpoint: two models that share a tokenizer and chat template may produce the same count sequence up to a fixed offset. Yet the validity of this signal for broader \emph{model-family} attribution has received little direct holdout testing. We conduct a frozen-threshold study over 24 labeled endpoint pairs, split evenly into a development set and an untouched holdout set, with three temporal repeats and 30 controlled texts per pair. We introduce a validity-gated result contract that distinguishes an observed dissimilarity from an uninformative measurement caused by missing usage data, rate limits, or endpoint policy. The resulting shift-invariant exact-match score perfectly separates the 12 development pairs, yielding a frozen threshold of 0.725. On holdout, however, only 6 of 12 pairs are eligible under the pre-specified three-repeat rule. Among eligible pairs, balanced accuracy is 0.75, sensitivity is 0.50 (95\% Wilson interval 0.15--0.85), and specificity is 1.00 (0.342--1.00). Two same-family pairs---Qwen 3.8 and DeepSeek V4 variants---fall below the frozen threshold. Across 4,320 formal API calls, every log is replayable, while holdout contains 189 non-200 responses and 157 successful responses without prompt-token usage. The study therefore validates token-count consistency as a fingerprint of a shared \emph{tokenization stack}, but rejects its use as a standalone necessary test for model-family lineage.

Bolin Chen · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

Sleight of Word Benchmark: Can Language Models Notice If Their Own Output Was Tampered With?

A simple benchmark is built in which a single word is consistently substituted with another in the generation process, and two distinct axes are measured: metrics that relate to the model's surprise, as well as an evaluation of the textual reaction for 19 different open-weight language models.

A. Cetoli · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

IndicDetect: Evaluating Cross-Lingual LLM-Generated Text Detection for Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil

IndicDetect provides standard data splits, an evaluation protocol, and baselines to establish a robust, language-aware foundation for AI-generated text detection in Indic scripts, and finds substantial robustness failures.

Bhaskar Ganesh Devalla, Junchao Wu, Nilesh Dokuparthi et al. · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Open access Sep 2026

When Less is More: Understanding When Token Filtering Helps and Fails in AI-generated Text Detection

The rapid advancement of large language models (LLMs) has made AI-generated text detection increasingly critical. Existing zero-shot detectors assume that more token-level evidence leads to more reliable detection. However, our empirical study challenges this consensus: fewer tokens sometimes work better, retaining only 40% can yield optimal performance, yet this benefit is not universal. Using the Entropy Gap Score (EGS), we introduce top-$k$ cumulative probability filtering as a diagnostic probe. Across three representative settings, filtering exhibits strikingly different behaviors. We analyze EGS via typical set theory and quantify its dynamics through entropy calibration and distribution analysis. We find that filtering helps for weak source LMs, where low-entropy tokens are harmful, but fails for strong source LMs, where they are not notably harmful. Our work provides the first systematic analysis showing that some tokens are not merely uninformative but systematically harmful due to entropy miscalibration, revealing a two-sided trade-off in token-level detection.

Xiaoyang Han, Lvxiaowei Xu, Ming Cai · 0 citations
#artificial intelligence Preprint Aug 2026

REIGN: Refurbished Embeddings with Integrated Guidance Networks for Efficient Context-Length Scaling

This work proposes REIGN (Refurbished Embeddings with Integrated Guidance Networks), a contrastively trained bi-encoder that operates on sequences of contextualised chunk embeddings from a frozen Guidance Network rather than on raw tokens for document-to-document retrieval.

Devrim Cavusoglu, Emre Akbas · 0 citations

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MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 27, 2026

Looking beyond natural sequences

A new machine-learning framework aims to improve the success rate of computational protein design while moving away from results that reproduce sequences found in nature.

MIT News · Artificial Intelligence Aug 20, 2026

Paving the way for greener ammonia production

New MIT research could lead to better materials for a fossil-fuel-free process for making the chemical that's essential to fertilizer and other products.

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