Context is Enough: Empirical Validation of $\textit{Sequentiality}$ on Essays
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arXiv
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| Autores principales: | , , |
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| Formato: | Preprint |
| Publicado: |
2025
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| _version_ | 1866912704411729920 |
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| author | Sunny, Amal Gupta, Advay Sreekumar, Vishnu |
| author_facet | Sunny, Amal Gupta, Advay Sreekumar, Vishnu |
| contents | Recent work has proposed using Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantify narrative flow through a measure called sequentiality, which combines topic and contextual terms. A recent critique argued that the original results were confounded by how topics were selected for the topic-based component, and noted that the metric had not been validated against ground-truth measures of flow. That work proposed using only the contextual term as a more conceptually valid and interpretable alternative. In this paper, we empirically validate that proposal. Using two essay datasets with human-annotated trait scores, ASAP++ and ELLIPSE, we show that the contextual version of sequentiality aligns more closely with human assessments of discourse-level traits such as Organization and Cohesion. While zero-shot prompted LLMs predict trait scores more accurately than the contextual measure alone, the contextual measure adds more predictive value than both the topic-only and original sequentiality formulations when combined with standard linguistic features. Notably, this combination also outperforms the zero-shot LLM predictions, highlighting the value of explicitly modeling sentence-to-sentence flow. Our findings support the use of context-based sequentiality as a validated, interpretable, and complementary feature for automated essay scoring and related NLP tasks. |
| format | Preprint |
| id |
arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_09185 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2025 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | Context is Enough: Empirical Validation of $\textit{Sequentiality}$ on Essays Sunny, Amal Gupta, Advay Sreekumar, Vishnu Computation and Language Recent work has proposed using Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantify narrative flow through a measure called sequentiality, which combines topic and contextual terms. A recent critique argued that the original results were confounded by how topics were selected for the topic-based component, and noted that the metric had not been validated against ground-truth measures of flow. That work proposed using only the contextual term as a more conceptually valid and interpretable alternative. In this paper, we empirically validate that proposal. Using two essay datasets with human-annotated trait scores, ASAP++ and ELLIPSE, we show that the contextual version of sequentiality aligns more closely with human assessments of discourse-level traits such as Organization and Cohesion. While zero-shot prompted LLMs predict trait scores more accurately than the contextual measure alone, the contextual measure adds more predictive value than both the topic-only and original sequentiality formulations when combined with standard linguistic features. Notably, this combination also outperforms the zero-shot LLM predictions, highlighting the value of explicitly modeling sentence-to-sentence flow. Our findings support the use of context-based sequentiality as a validated, interpretable, and complementary feature for automated essay scoring and related NLP tasks. |
| title | Context is Enough: Empirical Validation of $\textit{Sequentiality}$ on Essays |
| topic | Computation and Language |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09185 |