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Auteurs principaux: Fong, Hortense, Gui, George
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2024
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Accès en ligne:https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15239
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author Fong, Hortense
Gui, George
author_facet Fong, Hortense
Gui, George
contents Understanding when and why consumers engage with stories is crucial for content creators and platforms. While existing theories suggest that audience beliefs of what is going to happen should play an important role in engagement decisions, empirical work has mostly focused on developing techniques to directly extract features from actual content, rather than capturing forward-looking beliefs, due to the lack of a principled way to model such beliefs in unstructured narrative data. To complement existing feature extraction techniques, this paper introduces a novel framework that leverages large language models to model audience forward-looking beliefs about how stories might unfold. Our method generates multiple potential continuations for each story and extracts features related to expectations, uncertainty, and surprise using established content analysis techniques. Applying our method to over 30,000 book chapters, we demonstrate that our framework complements existing feature engineering techniques by amplifying their marginal explanatory power on average by 31%. The results reveal that different types of engagement-continuing to read, commenting, and voting-are driven by distinct combinations of current and anticipated content features. Our framework provides a novel way to study and explore how audience forward-looking beliefs shape their engagement with narrative media, with implications for marketing strategy in content-focused industries.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2412_15239
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modeling Story Expectations to Understand Engagement: A Generative Framework Using LLMs
Fong, Hortense
Gui, George
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
General Economics
Economics
Methodology
68T50, 91F20
H.3.1; I.2.7
Understanding when and why consumers engage with stories is crucial for content creators and platforms. While existing theories suggest that audience beliefs of what is going to happen should play an important role in engagement decisions, empirical work has mostly focused on developing techniques to directly extract features from actual content, rather than capturing forward-looking beliefs, due to the lack of a principled way to model such beliefs in unstructured narrative data. To complement existing feature extraction techniques, this paper introduces a novel framework that leverages large language models to model audience forward-looking beliefs about how stories might unfold. Our method generates multiple potential continuations for each story and extracts features related to expectations, uncertainty, and surprise using established content analysis techniques. Applying our method to over 30,000 book chapters, we demonstrate that our framework complements existing feature engineering techniques by amplifying their marginal explanatory power on average by 31%. The results reveal that different types of engagement-continuing to read, commenting, and voting-are driven by distinct combinations of current and anticipated content features. Our framework provides a novel way to study and explore how audience forward-looking beliefs shape their engagement with narrative media, with implications for marketing strategy in content-focused industries.
title Modeling Story Expectations to Understand Engagement: A Generative Framework Using LLMs
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
General Economics
Economics
Methodology
68T50, 91F20
H.3.1; I.2.7
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.15239