ConceptCarve: Dynamic Realization of Evidence

Eylon Caplan, Dan Goldwasser


Abstract
Finding evidence for human opinion and behavior at scale is a challenging task, often requiring an understanding of sophisticated thought patterns among vast online communities found on social media. For example, studying how ‘gun ownership’ is related to the perception of ‘Freedom’, requires a retrieval system that can operate at scale over social media posts, while dealing with two key challenges: (1) identifying abstract concept instances, (2) which can be instantiated differently across different communities. To address these, we introduce ConceptCarve, an evidence retrieval framework that utilizes traditional retrievers and LLMs to dynamically characterize the search space during retrieval. Our experiments show that ConceptCarve surpasses traditional retrieval systems in finding evidence within a social media community. It also produces an interpretable representation of the evidence for that community, which we use to qualitatively analyze complex thought patterns that manifest differently across the communities.
Anthology ID:
2025.acl-long.1014
Volume:
Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2025
Address:
Vienna, Austria
Editors:
Wanxiang Che, Joyce Nabende, Ekaterina Shutova, Mohammad Taher Pilehvar
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
20792–20809
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1014/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Eylon Caplan and Dan Goldwasser. 2025. ConceptCarve: Dynamic Realization of Evidence. In Proceedings of the 63rd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 20792–20809, Vienna, Austria. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
ConceptCarve: Dynamic Realization of Evidence (Caplan & Goldwasser, ACL 2025)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingestion-acl-25/2025.acl-long.1014.pdf