2025
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Unstructured Minds, Predictable Machines: A Comparative Study of Narrative Cohesion in Human and LLM Stream-of-Consciousness Writing
Nellia Dzhubaeva
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Katharina Trinley
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Laura Pissani
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 4: Student Research Workshop)
This paper examines differences between stream-of-consciousness (SoC) narratives written by humans and those generated by large language models (LLMs) to assess narrative coherence and personality expression. We generated texts by prompting LLMs (Llama-3.1-8B & DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B) with the first half of SoC-essays while either providing the models with the personality characteristics (Big Five) or omitting them. Our analysis revealed consistently low similarity between LLM-generated continuations and original human texts, as measured by cosine similarity, perplexity, and BLEU scores. Including explicit personality traits significantly enhanced Llama-3.1-8B’s performance, particularly in BLEU scores.Further analysis of personality expression showed varying alignment patterns between LLMs and human texts. Specifically, Llama-3.1-8B exhibited higher extraversion but low agreeableness, while DeepSeek-R1-Distill-Llama-8B displayed dramatic personality shifts during its reasoning process, especially when prompted with personality traits, with all models consistently showing very low Openness.
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Multilingual Political Views of Large Language Models: Identification and Steering
Daniil Gurgurov
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Katharina Trinley
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Ivan Vykopal
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Josef Van Genabith
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Simon Ostermann
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Roberto Zamparelli
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used in everyday tools and applications, raising concerns about their potential influence on political views. While prior research has shown that LLMs often exhibit measurable political biases-frequently skewing toward liberal or progressive positions-key gaps remain. Most existing studies evaluate only a narrow set of models and languages, leaving open questions about the generalizability of political biases across architectures, scales, and multilingual settings. Moreover, few works examine whether these biases can be actively controlled.In this work, we address these gaps through a large-scale study of political orientation in modern open-source instruction-tuned LLMs. We evaluate seven models, including LLaMA-3.1, Qwen-3, and Aya-Expanse, across 14 languages using the Political Compass Test with 11 semantically equivalent paraphrases per statement to ensure robust measurement. Our results reveal that larger models consistently shift toward libertarian-left positions, with significant variations across languages and model families. To test the manipulability of political stances, we utilize a simple center-of-mass activation intervention technique and show that it reliably steers model responses toward alternative ideological positions across multiple languages. Our code is publicly available at https://github.com/d-gurgurov/Political-Ideologies-LLMs.
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Language Arithmetics: Towards Systematic Language Neuron Identification and Manipulation
Daniil Gurgurov
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Katharina Trinley
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Yusser Al Ghussin
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Tanja Baeumel
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Josef Van Genabith
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Simon Ostermann
Proceedings of the 14th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing and the 4th Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Large language models (LLMs) exhibit strong multilingual abilities, yet the neural mechanisms behind language-specific processing remain unclear. We analyze language-specific neurons in Llama-3.1-8B, Mistral-Nemo-12B, and Aya-Expanse-8B & 32B across 21 typologically diverse languages, identifying neurons that control language behavior. Using the Language Activation Probability Entropy (LAPE) method, we show that these neurons cluster in deeper layers, with non-Latin scripts showing greater specialization. Related languages share overlapping neurons, reflecting internal representations of linguistic proximity.Through language arithmetics, i.e. systematic activation addition and multiplication, we steer models to deactivate unwanted languages and activate desired ones, outperforming established replacement approaches. These interventions effectively guide behavior across five multilingual tasks: language forcing, translation, QA, comprehension, and NLI. Manipulation is more successful for high-resource languages, while typological similarity improves effectiveness. We also demonstrate that neuron steering enhances downstream performance and reveal internal "fallback" mechanisms for language selection when neurons are progressively deactivated. Our code is made publicly available at https://github.com/d-gurgurov/Language-Neurons-Manipulation.