Uncovering the Bigger Picture: Comprehensive Event Understanding Via Diverse News Retrieval

Access to diverse perspectives is essential for understanding real-world events, yet most news retrieval systems prioritize textual relevance, leading to redundant results and limited viewpoint exposure. We propose NEWSCOPE, a two-stage framework for diverse news retrieval that enhances event coverage by explicitly modeling semantic variation at the sentence level. The first stage retrieves topically relevant content using dense retrieval, while the second stage applies sentence-level clustering and diversity-aware re-ranking to surface complementary information. To evaluate retrieval diversity, we introduce three interpretable metrics, namely Average Pairwise Distance, Positive Cluster Coverage, and Information Density Ratio, and construct two paragraph-level benchmarks: LocalNews and DSGlobal. Experiments show that NEWSCOPE consistently outperforms strong baselines, achieving significantly higher diversity without compromising relevance. Our results demonstrate the effectiveness of fine-grained, interpretable modeling in mitigating redundancy and promoting comprehensive event understanding. The data and code are available at https://github.com/tangyixuan/NEWSCOPE.

T-Retrievability: A Topic-Focused Approach to Measure Fair Document Exposure in Information Retrieval

Retrievability of a document is a collection-based statistic that measures its expected (reciprocal) rank of being retrieved within a specific rank cut-off. A collection with uniformly distributed retrievability scores across documents is an indicator of fair document exposure. While retrievability scores have been used to quantify the fairness of exposure for a collection, in our work, we use the distribution of retrievability scores to measure the exposure bias of retrieval models. We hypothesise that an uneven distribution of retrievability scores across the entire collection may not accurately reflect exposure bias but rather indicate variations in topical relevance. As a solution, we propose a topic-focused localised retrievability measure, which we call \textit{T-Retrievability} (topic-retrievability), which first computes retrievability scores over multiple groups of topically-related documents, and then aggregates these localised values to obtain the collection-level statistics. Our analysis using this proposed T-Retrievability measure uncovers new insights into the exposure characteristics of various neural ranking models. The findings suggest that this localised measure provides a more nuanced understanding of exposure fairness, offering a more reliable approach for assessing document accessibility in IR systems.

PILOT: Steering Synthetic Data Generation with Psychological & Linguistic Output Targeting

Generative AI applications commonly leverage user personas as a steering mechanism for synthetic data generation, but reliance on natural language representations forces models to make unintended inferences about which attributes to emphasize, limiting precise control over outputs. We introduce PILOT (Psychological and Linguistic Output Targeting), a two-phase framework for steering large language models with structured psycholinguistic profiles. In Phase 1, PILOT translates natural language persona descriptions into multidimensional profiles with normalized scores across linguistic and psychological dimensions. In Phase 2, these profiles guide generation along measurable axes of variation. We evaluate PILOT across three state-of-the-art LLMs (Mistral Large 2, Deepseek-R1, LLaMA 3.3 70B) using 25 synthetic personas under three conditions: Natural-language Persona Steering (NPS), Schema-Based Steering (SBS), and Hybrid Persona-Schema Steering (HPS). Results demonstrate that schema-based approaches significantly reduce artificial-sounding persona repetition while improving output coherence, with silhouette scores increasing from 0.098 to 0.237 and topic purity from 0.773 to 0.957. Our analysis reveals a fundamental trade-off: SBS produces more concise outputs with higher topical consistency, while NPS offers greater lexical diversity but reduced predictability. HPS achieves a balance between these extremes, maintaining output variety while preserving structural consistency. Expert linguistic evaluation confirms that PILOT maintains high response quality across all conditions, with no statistically significant differences between steering approaches.

ArgCMV: An Argument Summarization Benchmark for the LLM-era

Key point extraction is an important task in argument summarization which involves extracting high-level short summaries from arguments. Existing approaches for KP extraction have been mostly evaluated on the popular ArgKP21 dataset. In this paper, we highlight some of the major limitations of the ArgKP21 dataset and demonstrate the need for new benchmarks that are more representative of actual human conversations. Using SoTA large language models (LLMs), we curate a new argument key point extraction dataset called ArgCMV comprising of around 12K arguments from actual online human debates spread across over 3K topics. Our dataset exhibits higher complexity such as longer, co-referencing arguments, higher presence of subjective discourse units, and a larger range of topics over ArgKP21. We show that existing methods do not adapt well to ArgCMV and provide extensive benchmark results by experimenting with existing baselines and latest open source models. This work introduces a novel KP extraction dataset for long-context online discussions, setting the stage for the next generation of LLM-driven summarization research.

SliceSemOcc: Vertical Slice Based Multimodal 3D Semantic Occupancy Representation

Driven by autonomous driving's demands for precise 3D perception, 3D semantic occupancy prediction has become a pivotal research topic. Unlike bird's-eye-view (BEV) methods, which restrict scene representation to a 2D plane, occupancy prediction leverages a complete 3D voxel grid to model spatial structures in all dimensions, thereby capturing semantic variations along the vertical axis. However, most existing approaches overlook height-axis information when processing voxel features. And conventional SENet-style channel attention assigns uniform weight across all height layers, limiting their ability to emphasize features at different heights. To address these limitations, we propose SliceSemOcc, a novel vertical slice based multimodal framework for 3D semantic occupancy representation. Specifically, we extract voxel features along the height-axis using both global and local vertical slices. Then, a global local fusion module adaptively reconciles fine-grained spatial details with holistic contextual information. Furthermore, we propose the SEAttention3D module, which preserves height-wise resolution through average pooling and assigns dynamic channel attention weights to each height layer. Extensive experiments on nuScenes-SurroundOcc and nuScenes-OpenOccupancy datasets verify that our method significantly enhances mean IoU, achieving especially pronounced gains on most small-object categories. Detailed ablation studies further validate the effectiveness of the proposed SliceSemOcc framework.

Agentic AI for Software: thoughts from Software Engineering community

AI agents have recently shown significant promise in software engineering. Much public attention has been transfixed on the topic of code generation from Large Language Models (LLMs) via a prompt. However, software engineering is much more than programming, and AI agents go far beyond instructions given by a prompt. At the code level, common software tasks include code generation, testing, and program repair. Design level software tasks may include architecture exploration, requirements understanding, and requirements enforcement at the code level. Each of these software tasks involves micro-decisions which can be taken autonomously by an AI agent, aided by program analysis tools. This creates the vision of an AI software engineer, where the AI agent can be seen as a member of a development team. Conceptually, the key to successfully developing trustworthy agentic AI-based software workflows will be to resolve the core difficulty in software engineering - the deciphering and clarification of developer intent. Specification inference, or deciphering the intent, thus lies at the heart of many software tasks, including software maintenance and program repair. A successful deployment of agentic technology into software engineering would involve making conceptual progress in such intent inference via agents. Trusting the AI agent becomes a key aspect, as software engineering becomes more automated. Higher automation also leads to higher volume of code being automatically generated, and then integrated into code-bases. Thus to deal with this explosion, an emerging direction is AI-based verification and validation (V & V) of AI generated code. We posit that agentic software workflows in future will include such AIbased V&V.

Decoding Alignment: A Critical Survey of LLM Development Initiatives through Value-setting and Data-centric Lens

AI Alignment, primarily in the form of Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF), has been a cornerstone of the post-training phase in developing Large Language Models (LLMs). It has also been a popular research topic across various disciplines beyond Computer Science, including Philosophy and Law, among others, highlighting the socio-technical challenges involved. Nonetheless, except for the computational techniques related to alignment, there has been limited focus on the broader picture: the scope of these processes, which primarily rely on the selected objectives (values), and the data collected and used to imprint such objectives into the models. This work aims to reveal how alignment is understood and applied in practice from a value-setting and data-centric perspective. For this purpose, we investigate and survey (`audit') publicly available documentation released by 6 LLM development initiatives by 5 leading organizations shaping this technology, focusing on proprietary (OpenAI's GPT, Anthropic's Claude, Google's Gemini) and open-weight (Meta's Llama, Google's Gemma, and Alibaba's Qwen) initiatives, all published in the last 3 years. The findings are documented in detail per initiative, while there is also an overall summary concerning different aspects, mainly from a value-setting and data-centric perspective. On the basis of our findings, we discuss a series of broader related concerns.

LLM Analysis of 150+ years of German Parliamentary Debates on Migration Reveals Shift from Post-War Solidarity to Anti-Solidarity in the Last Decade

Migration has been a core topic in German political debate, from millions of expellees post World War II over labor migration to refugee movements in the recent past. Studying political speech regarding such wide-ranging phenomena in depth traditionally required extensive manual annotations, limiting the scope of analysis to small subsets of the data. Large language models (LLMs) have the potential to partially automate even complex annotation tasks. We provide an extensive evaluation of a multiple LLMs in annotating (anti-)solidarity subtypes in German parliamentary debates compared to a large set of thousands of human reference annotations (gathered over a year). We evaluate the influence of model size, prompting differences, fine-tuning, historical versus contemporary data; and we investigate systematic errors. Beyond methodological evaluation, we also interpret the resulting annotations from a social science lense, gaining deeper insight into (anti-)solidarity trends towards migrants in the German post-World War II period and recent past. Our data reveals a high degree of migrant-directed solidarity in the postwar period, as well as a strong trend towards anti-solidarity in the German parliament since 2015, motivating further research. These findings highlight the promise of LLMs for political text analysis and the importance of migration debates in Germany, where demographic decline and labor shortages coexist with rising polarization.

Beyond the Black Box: Integrating Lexical and Semantic Methods in Quantitative Discourse Analysis with BERTopic

Quantitative Discourse Analysis has seen growing adoption with the rise of Large Language Models and computational tools. However, reliance on black box software such as MAXQDA and NVivo risks undermining methodological transparency and alignment with research goals. This paper presents a hybrid, transparent framework for QDA that combines lexical and semantic methods to enable triangulation, reproducibility, and interpretability. Drawing from a case study in historical political discourse, we demonstrate how custom Python pipelines using NLTK, spaCy, and Sentence Transformers allow fine-grained control over preprocessing, lemmatisation, and embedding generation. We further detail our iterative BERTopic modelling process, incorporating UMAP dimensionality reduction, HDBSCAN clustering, and c-TF-IDF keyword extraction, optimised through parameter tuning and multiple runs to enhance topic coherence and coverage. By juxtaposing precise lexical searches with context-aware semantic clustering, we argue for a multi-layered approach that mitigates the limitations of either method in isolation. Our workflow underscores the importance of code-level transparency, researcher agency, and methodological triangulation in computational discourse studies. Code and supplementary materials are available via GitHub.

Automatic Question & Answer Generation Using Generative Large Language Model (LLM)

\Abstract{In the realm of education, student evaluation holds equal significance as imparting knowledge. To be evaluated, students usually need to go through text-based academic assessment methods. Instructors need to make diverse sets of questions that need to be fair for all students to prove their adequacy over a particular topic. This can prove to be quite challenging as they may need to manually go through several different lecture materials. Our objective is to make this whole process much easier by implementing Automatic Question Answer Generation /(AQAG), using fine-tuned generative LLM. For tailoring the instructor's preferred question style (MCQ, conceptual, or factual questions), prompt Engineering (PE) is being utilized. In this research, we propose to leverage unsupervised learning methods in NLP, primarily focusing on the English language. This approach empowers the base Meta-Llama 2-7B model to integrate RACE dataset as training data for the fine-tuning process. Creating a customized model that will offer efficient solutions for educators, instructors, and individuals engaged in text-based evaluations. A reliable and efficient tool for generating questions and answers can free up valuable time and resources, thus streamlining their evaluation processes.}