@inproceedings{wright-etal-2025-cognitive,
    title = "Cognitive Linguistic Identity Fusion Score ({CLIFS}): A Scalable {C}ognition{-}{I}nformed Approach to Quantifying Identity Fusion from Text",
    author = "Wright, Devin R.  and
      An, Jisun  and
      Ahn, Yong-Yeol",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.588/",
    pages = "11643--11673",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-332-6",
    abstract = "Quantifying *identity fusion*{---}the psychological merging of self with another entity or abstract target (e.g., a religious group, political party, ideology, value, brand, belief, etc.){---}is vital for understanding a wide range of group{-}based human behaviors. We introduce the Cognitive Linguistic Identity Fusion Score ([CLIFS](https://github.com/DevinW-sudo/CLIFS)), a novel metric that integrates cognitive linguistics with large language models (LLMs), which builds on implicit metaphor detection. Unlike traditional pictorial and verbal scales, which require controlled surveys or direct field contact, CLIFS delivers fully automated, scalable assessments while maintaining strong alignment with the established verbal measure. In benchmarks, CLIFS outperforms both existing automated approaches and human annotation. As a proof of concept, we apply CLIFS to violence risk assessment to demonstrate that it can improve violence risk assessment by more than 240{\%}. Building on our identification of a new NLP task and early success, we underscore the need to develop larger, more diverse datasets that encompass additional fusion-target domains and cultural backgrounds to enhance generalizability and further advance this emerging area. CLIFS models and code are public at [https://github.com/DevinW-sudo/CLIFS](https://github.com/DevinW-sudo/CLIFS)."
}