@inproceedings{litchiowong-2026-phase,
    title = "Phase Transitions in Affective Meaning Divergence: The Hidden Drift Before the Break",
    author = "Litchiowong, Napassorn",
    editor = "T.Y.S.S., Santosh  and
      Rodriguez, Juan Diego  and
      de Gibert, Ona",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the {A}ssociation for {C}omputational {L}inguistics ({ACL} 2026)",
    month = jul,
    year = "2026",
    address = "San Diego, California, United States",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-acl/2026.acl-srw.19/",
    pages = "206--224",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-393-7",
    abstract = "One partner says ``Fine'' meaning resolution; the other hears surrender. The word is shared; the affective uptake is not. We formalize this as **affective meaning divergence** (AMD), the total-variation distance between interlocutors' anchor-conditioned affect distributions. Building on speech-act theory, common-ground accumulation, and entropy-regularized game theory, we derive a logit best-response map whose dynamics undergo a *saddle-node bifurcation*: when $\beta\alpha > 4$, a monotone increase in AMD-driven load produces an abrupt, hysteretic collapse of repair coordination. On Conversations Gone Awry (CGA-Wiki; $N=652$), derailing conversations exhibit critical-slowing-down (CSD) signatures across multiple levels: lexical divergence variance ($p<0.001$, $d=0.36$), AMD variance ($p=0.001$, $d=0.26$), and dialog-act repair variance ($p=0.016$, $d=0.20$), all significant after correction and stronger than toxicity and sentiment baselines. AMD provides a distinct temporal signature, with retrospectively measured variance peaking at the bifurcation point while toxicity variance peaks earlier, and is the only indicator grounded in the theoretical framework. Boundary-condition analysis on CGA-CMV ($N=1,169$) yields mixed but directionally consistent evidence."
}