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Main Authors: Spangher, Alexander, Youn, James, DeButts, Matt, Peng, Nanyun, Ferrara, Emilio, May, Jonathan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05192
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author Spangher, Alexander
Youn, James
DeButts, Matt
Peng, Nanyun
Ferrara, Emilio
May, Jonathan
author_facet Spangher, Alexander
Youn, James
DeButts, Matt
Peng, Nanyun
Ferrara, Emilio
May, Jonathan
contents Human writers plan, then write. For large language models (LLMs) to play a role in longer-form article generation, we must understand the planning steps humans make before writing. We explore one kind of planning, source-selection in news, as a case-study for evaluating plans in long-form generation. We ask: why do specific stories call for specific kinds of sources? We imagine a generative process for story writing where a source-selection schema is first selected by a journalist, and then sources are chosen based on categories in that schema. Learning the article's plan means predicting the schema initially chosen by the journalist. Working with professional journalists, we adapt five existing schemata and introduce three new ones to describe journalistic plans for the inclusion of sources in documents. Then, inspired by Bayesian latent-variable modeling, we develop metrics to select the most likely plan, or schema, underlying a story, which we use to compare schemata. We find that two schemata: stance and social affiliation best explain source plans in most documents. However, other schemata like textual entailment explain source plans in factually rich topics like "Science". Finally, we find we can predict the most suitable schema given just the article's headline with reasonable accuracy. We see this as an important case-study for human planning, and provides a framework and approach for evaluating other kinds of plans. We release a corpora, NewsSources, with annotations for 4M articles.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2411_05192
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Explaining Mixtures of Sources in News Articles
Spangher, Alexander
Youn, James
DeButts, Matt
Peng, Nanyun
Ferrara, Emilio
May, Jonathan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human writers plan, then write. For large language models (LLMs) to play a role in longer-form article generation, we must understand the planning steps humans make before writing. We explore one kind of planning, source-selection in news, as a case-study for evaluating plans in long-form generation. We ask: why do specific stories call for specific kinds of sources? We imagine a generative process for story writing where a source-selection schema is first selected by a journalist, and then sources are chosen based on categories in that schema. Learning the article's plan means predicting the schema initially chosen by the journalist. Working with professional journalists, we adapt five existing schemata and introduce three new ones to describe journalistic plans for the inclusion of sources in documents. Then, inspired by Bayesian latent-variable modeling, we develop metrics to select the most likely plan, or schema, underlying a story, which we use to compare schemata. We find that two schemata: stance and social affiliation best explain source plans in most documents. However, other schemata like textual entailment explain source plans in factually rich topics like "Science". Finally, we find we can predict the most suitable schema given just the article's headline with reasonable accuracy. We see this as an important case-study for human planning, and provides a framework and approach for evaluating other kinds of plans. We release a corpora, NewsSources, with annotations for 4M articles.
title Explaining Mixtures of Sources in News Articles
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.05192