Smitha Muthya Sudheendra

Smitha Muthya Sudheendra, Jaideep Srivastava

Human annotation is central to NLP evaluation, yet subjective tasks often exhibit substantial variability across annotators. While large language models (LLMs) can provide structured reasoning to support annotation, their influence on human annotation behavior remains unclear. We introduce ReasonAlign, a reasoning-based annotation scaffold that exposes LLM-generated explanations while withholding predicted labels. We frame this as a controlled study of how reasoning affects human annotation behavior, rather than a full evaluation of annotation accuracy. Using a two-pass protocol inspired by Delphi-style revision, annotators first label instances independently and then revise their decisions after viewing model-generated reasoning. We evaluate the approach on sentiment classification and opinion detection tasks, analyzing changes in inter-annotator agreement and revision behavior. To quantify these effects, we introduce the Annotator Effort Proxy (AEP), a metric capturing the proportion of labels revised after exposure to reasoning. Our results show that exposure to reasoning is associated with increased agreement alongside minimal revision, suggesting that reasoning primarily helps resolve ambiguous cases without inducing widespread changes. These findings provide insight into how reasoning explanations shape annotation consistency and highlight reasoning-based scaffolds as a practical mechanism for supporting human-AI annotation workflows.

Smitha Muthya Sudheendra, Mani Deep Cherukuri, Jaideep Srivastava

Natural language understanding inherently depends on integrating multiple complementary perspectives spanning from surface syntax to deep semantics and world knowledge. However, current Aspect-Based Sentiment Analysis (ABSA) systems typically exploit isolated linguistic views, thereby overlooking the intricate interplay between structural representations that humans naturally leverage. We propose CMV-Fuse, a Cross-Modal View fusion framework that emulates human language processing by systematically combining multiple linguistic perspectives. Our approach systematically orchestrates four linguistic perspectives: Abstract Meaning Representations, constituency parsing, dependency syntax, and semantic attention, enhanced with external knowledge integration. Through hierarchical gated attention fusion across local syntactic, intermediate semantic, and global knowledge levels, CMV-Fuse captures both fine-grained structural patterns and broad contextual understanding. A novel structure aware multi-view contrastive learning mechanism ensures consistency across complementary representations while maintaining computational efficiency. Extensive experiments demonstrate substantial improvements over strong baselines on standard benchmarks, with analysis revealing how each linguistic view contributes to more robust sentiment analysis.