Scott Friedman

Maryam Berijanian, Spencer Dork, Kuldeep Singh et al.

Understanding and modeling collective intelligence is essential for addressing complex social systems. Directed graphs called fuzzy cognitive maps (FCMs) offer a powerful tool for encoding causal mental models, but extracting high-integrity FCMs from text is challenging. This study presents an approach using large language models (LLMs) to automate FCM extraction. We introduce novel graph-based similarity measures and evaluate them by correlating their outputs with human judgments through the Elo rating system. Results show positive correlations with human evaluations, but even the best-performing measure exhibits limitations in capturing FCM nuances. Fine-tuning LLMs improves performance, but existing measures still fall short. This study highlights the need for soft similarity measures tailored to FCM extraction, advancing collective intelligence modeling with NLP.

Noam Benkler, Drisana Mosaphir, Scott Friedman et al.

The fields of AI current lacks methods to quantitatively assess and potentially alter the moral values inherent in the output of large language models (LLMs). However, decades of social science research has developed and refined widely-accepted moral value surveys, such as the World Values Survey (WVS), eliciting value judgments from direct questions in various geographies. We have turned those questions into value statements and use NLP to compute to how well popular LLMs are aligned with moral values for various demographics and cultures. While the WVS is accepted as an explicit assessment of values, we lack methods for assessing implicit moral and cultural values in media, e.g., encountered in social media, political rhetoric, narratives, and generated by AI systems such as LLMs that are increasingly present in our daily lives. As we consume online content and utilize LLM outputs, we might ask, which moral values are being implicitly promoted or undercut, or -- in the case of LLMs -- if they are intending to represent a cultural identity, are they doing so consistently? In this paper we utilize a Recognizing Value Resonance (RVR) NLP model to identify WVS values that resonate and conflict with a given passage of output text. We apply RVR to the text generated by LLMs to characterize implicit moral values, allowing us to quantify the moral/cultural distance between LLMs and various demographics that have been surveyed using the WVS. In line with other work we find that LLMs exhibit several Western-centric value biases; they overestimate how conservative people in non-Western countries are, they are less accurate in representing gender for non-Western countries, and portray older populations as having more traditional values. Our results highlight value misalignment and age groups, and a need for social science informed technological solutions addressing value plurality in LLMs.

Scott E. Friedman, Noam Benkler, Drisana Mosaphir et al.

Large language models (LLMs) generate diverse, situated, persuasive texts from a plurality of potential perspectives, influenced heavily by their prompts and training data. As part of LLM adoption, we seek to characterize - and ideally, manage - the socio-cultural values that they express, for reasons of safety, accuracy, inclusion, and cultural fidelity. We present a validated approach to automatically (1) extracting heterogeneous latent value propositions from texts, (2) assessing resonance and conflict of values with texts, and (3) combining these operations to characterize the pluralistic value alignment of human-sourced and LLM-sourced textual data.

Ian H. Magnusson, Scott E. Friedman

Recent transformer-based approaches demonstrate promising results on relational scientific information extraction. Existing datasets focus on high-level description of how research is carried out. Instead we focus on the subtleties of how experimental associations are presented by building SciClaim, a dataset of scientific claims drawn from Social and Behavior Science (SBS), PubMed, and CORD-19 papers. Our novel graph annotation schema incorporates not only coarse-grained entity spans as nodes and relations as edges between them, but also fine-grained attributes that modify entities and their relations, for a total of 12,738 labels in the corpus. By including more label types and more than twice the label density of previous datasets, SciClaim captures causal, comparative, predictive, statistical, and proportional associations over experimental variables along with their qualifications, subtypes, and evidence. We extend work in transformer-based joint entity and relation extraction to effectively infer our schema, showing the promise of fine-grained knowledge graphs in scientific claims and beyond.

Scott E. Friedman, Ian H. Magnusson, Sonja M. Schmer-Galunder

Qualitative causal relationships compactly express the direction, dependency, temporal constraints, and monotonicity constraints of discrete or continuous interactions in the world. In everyday or academic language, we may express interactions between quantities (e.g., sleep decreases stress), between discrete events or entities (e.g., a protein inhibits another protein's transcription), or between intentional or functional factors (e.g., hospital patients pray to relieve their pain). This paper presents a transformer-based NLP architecture that jointly identifies and extracts (1) variables or factors described in language, (2) qualitative causal relationships over these variables, and (3) qualifiers and magnitudes that constrain these causal relationships. We demonstrate this approach and include promising results from in two use cases, processing textual inputs from academic publications, news articles, and social media.

Scott Friedman, Jeff Rye, David LaVergne et al.

Analytic software tools and workflows are increasing in capability, complexity, number, and scale, and the integrity of our workflows is as important as ever. Specifically, we must be able to inspect the process of analytic workflows to assess (1) confidence of the conclusions, (2) risks and biases of the operations involved, (3) sensitivity of the conclusions to sources and agents, (4) impact and pertinence of various sources and agents, and (5) diversity of the sources that support the conclusions. We present an approach that tracks agents' provenance with PROV-O in conjunction with agents' appraisals and evidence links (expressed in our novel DIVE ontology). Together, PROV-O and DIVE enable dynamic propagation of confidence and counter-factual refutation to improve human-machine trust and analytic integrity. We demonstrate representative software developed for user interaction with that provenance, and discuss key needs for organizations adopting such approaches. We demonstrate all of these assessments in a multi-agent analysis scenario, using an interactive web-based information validation UI.

Scott E. Friedman, Robert P. Goldman, Richard G. Freedman et al.

Many real-world planning domains involve diverse information sources, external entities, and variable-reliability agents, all of which may impact the confidence, risk, and sensitivity of plans. Humans reviewing a plan may lack context about these factors; however, this information is available during the domain generation, which means it can also be interwoven into the planner and its resulting plans. This paper presents a provenance-based approach to explaining automated plans. Our approach (1) extends the SHOP3 HTN planner to generate dependency information, (2) transforms the dependency information into an established PROV-O representation, and (3) uses graph propagation and TMS-inspired algorithms to support dynamic and counter-factual assessment of information flow, confidence, and support. We qualified our approach's explanatory scope with respect to explanation targets from the automated planning literature and the information analysis literature, and we demonstrate its ability to assess a plan's pertinence, sensitivity, risk, assumption support, diversity, and relative confidence.