Highest Rated Papers
Burial and Belonging
Osman Balkan
Studies in Ethnicity and Nationalism·2015·29 citations
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>This article explores the role that funerary practices and burial decisions play in the construction of national and political identities amongst<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">M</jats:styled-content>uslim immigrants in<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">G</jats:styled-content>ermany. Drawing on ethnographic research and interviews with Islamic undertakers, migrant families, and religious leaders in<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">B</jats:styled-content>erlin it argues that the act of burial serves as a powerful means to assert belonging in migratory settings. While local burial laws impact the feasibility of<jats:styled-content style="fixed-case">I</jats:styled-content>slamic funerary rites, this article suggests that family ties, ideas about the soil, and feelings of social exclusion play a larger role in shaping burial outcomes than the laws of the dead. By conferring a sense of fixity or permanence to identities that are more fluid or ambivalent in life, determining where a dead body belongs helps demarcate social and communal boundaries.</jats:p>
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →Listening Between the Lines: Decoding Podcast Narratives with Language Modeling
Shreya Gupta, Ojasva Saxena, Arghodeep Nandi, Sarah Masud, Kiran Garimella, Tanmoy Chakraborty
arXiv·2025
Podcasts have become a central arena for shaping public opinion, making them a vital source for understanding contemporary discourse. Their typically unscripted, multi-themed, and conversational style offers a rich but complex form of data. To analyze how podcasts persuade and inform, we must examine their narrative structures -- specifically, the narrative frames they employ.
The fluid and conversational nature of podcasts presents a significant challenge for automated analysis. We show that existing large language models, typically trained on more structured text such as news articles, struggle to capture the subtle cues that human listeners rely on to identify narrative frames. As a result, current approaches fall short of accurately analyzing podcast narratives at scale.
To solve this, we develop and evaluate a fine-tuned BERT model that explicitly links narrative frames to specific entities mentioned in the conversation, effectively grounding the abstract frame in concrete details. Our approach then uses these granular frame labels and correlates them with high-level topics to reveal broader discourse trends. The primary contributions of this paper are: (i) a novel frame-labeling methodology that more closely aligns with human judgment for messy, conversational data, and (ii) a new analysis that uncovers the systematic relationship between what is being discussed (the topic) and how it is being presented (the frame), offering a more robust framework for studying influence in digital media.
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →The Riddle of Reflection: Evaluating Reasoning and Self-Awareness in Multilingual LLMs using Indian Riddles
Abhinav P M, Ojasva Saxena, Oswald C, Parameswari Krishnamurthy
arXiv·2025
The extent to which large language models (LLMs) can perform culturally grounded reasoning across non-English languages remains underexplored. This paper examines the reasoning and self-assessment abilities of LLMs across seven major Indian languages-Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Tamil, and Telugu. We introduce a multilingual riddle dataset combining traditional riddles with context-reconstructed variants and evaluate five LLMs-Gemini 2.5 Pro, Gemini 2.5 Flash, Mistral-Saba, LLaMA 4 Scout, and LLaMA 4 Maverick-under seven prompting strategies. In the first stage, we assess riddle-solving performance and find that while Gemini 2.5 Pro performs best overall, few-shot methods yield only marginal gains, and accuracy varies notably across languages. In the second stage, we conduct a self-evaluation experiment to measure reasoning consistency. The results reveal a key finding: a model's initial accuracy is inversely correlated with its ability to identify its own mistakes. Top-performing models such as Gemini 2.5 Pro are overconfident (4.34% True Negative Rate), whereas lower-performing models like LLaMA 4 Scout are substantially more self-aware (42.09% True Negative Rate). These results point to clear gaps in multilingual reasoning and highlight the need for models that not only reason effectively but also recognize their own limitations.
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →MMA-ASIA: A Multilingual and Multimodal Alignment Framework for Culturally-Grounded Evaluation
Weihua Zheng, Zhengyuan Liu, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Weiwen Xu, Xiaoxue Gao, Bryan Chen Zhengyu Tan, Bowei Zou, Chang Liu, Yujia Hu, Xing Xie, Xiaoyuan Yi, Jing Yao, Chaojun Wang, Long Li, Rui Liu, Huiyao Liu, Koji Inoue, Ryuichi Sumida, Tatsuya Kawahara, Fan Xu, Lingyu Ye, Wei Tian, Dongjun Kim, Jimin Jung, Jaehyung Seo, Nadya Yuki Wangsajaya, Pham Minh Duc, Ojasva Saxena, Palash Nandi, Xiyan Tao, Wiwik Karlina, Tuan Luong, Keertana Arun Vasan, Roy Ka-Wei Lee, Nancy F. Chen
arXiv·2025
Large language models (LLMs) are now used worldwide, yet their multimodal understanding and reasoning often degrade outside Western, high-resource settings. We propose MMA-ASIA, a comprehensive framework to evaluate LLMs' cultural awareness with a focus on Asian contexts. MMA-ASIA centers on a human-curated, multilingual, and multimodally aligned multiple-choice benchmark covering 8 Asian countries and 10 languages, comprising 27,000 questions; over 79 percent require multi-step reasoning grounded in cultural context, moving beyond simple memorization. To our knowledge, this is the first dataset aligned at the input level across three modalities: text, image (visual question answering), and speech. This enables direct tests of cross-modal transfer. Building on this benchmark, we propose a five-dimensional evaluation protocol that measures: (i) cultural-awareness disparities across countries, (ii) cross-lingual consistency, (iii) cross-modal consistency, (iv) cultural knowledge generalization, and (v) grounding validity. To ensure rigorous assessment, a Cultural Awareness Grounding Validation Module detects "shortcut learning" by checking whether the requisite cultural knowledge supports correct answers. Finally, through comparative model analysis, attention tracing, and an innovative Vision-ablated Prefix Replay (VPR) method, we probe why models diverge across languages and modalities, offering actionable insights for building culturally reliable multimodal LLMs.
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →Semantic reconstruction of continuous language from non-invasive brain recordings
Jerry Tang, Amanda LeBel, Shailee Jain, Alexander G. Huth
Nature Neuroscience·2023·239 citations
No abstract available
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →Max Ernst and Leonora Carrington’s surreal sanctuary
Joanna Moorhead, Tim Beddow
The World Of Interiors·2025
In 1938 Leonora Carrington and Max Ernst eloped to rural France where they decorated a farmhouse with Surrealist symbols of their partnership.
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →What You Can't Expect When You're Expecting
L. A. Paul
Res Philosophica·2015·103 citations
No abstract available
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →Increasing global precipitation whiplash due to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions
Xuezhi Tan, Xinxin Wu, Zeqin Huang, Jianyu Fu, Xuejin Tan, Simin Deng, Yaxin Liu, Thian Yew Gan, Bingjun Liu
Nature Communications·2023·77 citations
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>Precipitation whiplash, including abrupt shifts between wet and dry extremes, can cause large adverse impacts on human and natural systems. Here we quantify observed and projected changes in characteristics of sub-seasonal precipitation whiplash and investigate the role of individual anthropogenic influences on these changes. Results show that the occurrence frequency of global precipitation whiplash is projected to be 2.56 ± 0.16 times higher than in 1979–2019 by the end of the 21<jats:sup>st</jats:sup>Century, with increasingly rapid and intense transitions between two extremes. The most dramatic increases of whiplash show in the polar and monsoon regions. Changes in precipitation whiplash show a much higher percentage change than precipitation totals. In historical simulations, anthropogenic greenhouse gas (GHG) and aerosol emissions have increased and decreased precipitation whiplash occurrences, respectively. By 2079, anthropogenic GHGs are projected to increase 55 ± 4% of the occurrences risk of precipitation whiplash, which is driven by shifts in circulation patterns conducive to precipitation extremes.</jats:p>
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →The problem of misfortunes
Carlson Ng, Nathan Kowalsky
Religious Studies·2025
This paper critiques the use of the term ‘evil’ in philosophical discussions of the problem of evil. We argue that what is commonly identified as ‘evil’ in this debate is better as ‘misfortune.’ The division between moral and natural evil equivocates between agentic and non-agentic ‘evil,’ undermining its coherence as a unifying concept. Evil events are necessarily caused by evildoers, which are non-existent in events of natural evil. By contrast, ‘misfortune’ places the focus on the victim regardless of the source, better capturing what philosophers intend with the prior term ‘evil.’ Our more precise definition of ‘evil’ satisfies Jean Nabert’s notion of evil as the unjustifiable while also being sufficiently distinct from badness. What distinguishes ‘evil’ from mere badness is moral erasure, which is the perception of other human beings as objects unworthy of moral consideration. While a bad person causes misfortunes as a trade-off in pursuit of a perceived good, an evil person is either completely indifferent to their victim’s misfortunes, or malicious by deliberately causing misfortunes for pleasure’s sake. Our distinction between ‘misfortune’ and ‘evil’ clarified as (im)moral, indifferent, or malicious challenges the assumption that evil, as traditionally framed, poses a direct contradiction to God’s existence.
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →Who can receive the pass? A computational model for quantifying availability in soccer
Uwe Dick, Daniel Link, Ulf Brefeld
Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery·2022·16 citations
<jats:title>Abstract</jats:title><jats:p>The paper presents a computational approach to Availability of soccer players. Availability is defined as the probability that a pass reaches the target player without being intercepted by opponents. Clearly, a computational model for this probability grounds on models for ball dynamics, player movements, and technical skills of the pass giver. Our approach aggregates these quantities for all possible passes to the target player to compute a single Availability value. Empirically, our approach outperforms state-of-the-art competitors using data from 58 professional soccer matches. Moreover, our experiments indicate that the model can even outperform soccer coaches in assessing the availability of soccer players from static images.</jats:p>
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →Iron and the Soul
Henry Rollins
1994
Ever read an article that changes your life's path? I stumbled across an essay by musician Henry Rollins in 2009, and I've revisited it at least once a year ever since. I've republished the essay below, followed by how this essay has changed my life. Enjoy! "Iron and the SOul" by henry Rollins I believe
★ 5.0 (1)
View paper →The mis-education of the Filipino
Renato Constantino
Journal of Contemporary Asia·1970·58 citations
No abstract available
★ 5.0 (1)
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