Leyi Ouyang

Leyi Ouyang

Diplomatic events consistently prompt widespread public discussion and debate. Public sentiment plays a critical role in diplomacy, as a good sentiment provides vital support for policy implementation, helps resolve international issues, and shapes a nation's international image. Traditional methods for gauging public sentiment, such as large-scale surveys or manual content analysis of media, are typically time-consuming, labor-intensive, and lack the capacity for forward-looking analysis. We propose a novel framework that identifies specific modifications for diplomatic event narratives to shift public sentiment from negative to neutral or positive. First, we train a language model to predict public reaction towards diplomatic events. To this end, we construct a dataset comprising descriptions of diplomatic events and their associated public discussions. Second, guided by communication theories and in collaboration with domain experts, we predetermined several textual features for modification, ensuring that any alterations changed the event's narrative framing while preserving its core facts.We develop a counterfactual generation algorithm that employs a large language model to systematically produce modified versions of an original text. The results show that this framework successfully shifted public sentiment to a more favorable state with a 70\% success rate. This framework can therefore serve as a practical tool for diplomats, policymakers, and communication specialists, offering data-driven insights on how to frame diplomatic initiatives or report on events to foster a more desirable public sentiment.

Leyi Ouyang

Modern news is often comprehensive, weaving together information from diverse domains, including technology, finance, and agriculture. This very comprehensiveness creates a challenge for interpretation, as audiences typically possess specialized knowledge related to their expertise, age, or standpoint. Consequently, a reader might fully understand the financial implications of a story but fail to grasp or even actively misunderstand its legal or technological dimensions, resulting in critical comprehension gaps. In this work, we investigate how to identify these comprehension gaps and provide solutions to improve audiences' understanding of news content, particularly in the aspects of articles outside their primary domains of knowledge. We propose MADES, an agent-based framework designed to simulate societal communication. The framework utilizes diverse agents, each configured to represent a specific occupation or age group. Each agent is equipped with a memory system. These agents are then simulated to discuss the news. This process enables us to monitor and analyze their behavior and cognitive processes. Our findings indicate that the framework can identify confusions and misunderstandings within news content through its iterative discussion process. Based on these accurate identifications, the framework then designs supplementary material. We validated these outcomes using both statistical analysis and human evaluation, and the results show that agents exhibit significantly improved news understanding after receiving this supplementary material.