@inproceedings{hoefer-martin-2026-measuring,
    title = "Measuring Perceptions of Personhood with Semantic Proto-role Properties",
    author = "Hoefer, Elizabeth Spaulding  and
      Martin, James",
    editor = "Voigt, Rob  and
      Warstadt, Alex  and
      Feldman, Naomi  and
      Linzen, Tal",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the Society for Computation in Linguistics 2026",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, CA",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl-workshops/2026.scil-main.1/",
    pages = "1--14",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-412-5",
    abstract = "We show that semantic proto-role properties can be used as a tool to measure implicit human perceptions of agency and patiency of entities in human-generated text. First, we demonstrate that silver-generated semantic proto-role property labels are strongly correlated with both human judgment and a probabilistic text-based measure of anthropomorphism. Then, we use our measure to quantify linguistic idiosyncrasies across different AI-related Reddit communities. Our measure shows that subreddits dedicated to discussing AI companionship ascribe higher sentience to ``bots'' and higher agency to ``companies'' when compared to other subreddits. This phenomenon reveals not only the unique way in which chatbots are anthropomorphized in such subreddits, but also the users' keen awareness of their power imbalance with the companies that created the chatbots."
}