P8 said: "as I get familiar with this system [C3], I feel more skilled" to use the highlighted and grayed phrases.

It is worth noting that P3 and P8 mentioned feeling more comfortable with the more familiar visualization in C1 and C2 during their first impression of the conditions.

Specifically, they underscore the need for co-adaptive systems that can evolve along with users' mental models and definitions of labels.

Most previous research in counterfactual generation has focused on the model side by either generating counterfactuals to improve the model's performance or explaining its behaviors post hoc.

Variation Theory provides the conceptual basis for generating structurally consistent differences, while Structural Alignment Theory (SAT) enhances the user's ability in recognizing and processing these differences.

While SAT-based rendering supported human sensemaking in both Gero et al. [29] and Mocha, we also show that the combination of VT and SAT support the model's learning.

This finding is consistent with previous work that supports users' sense-making of text, e.g., by modulating text saliency. Specifically, Gu et al. [32] and Gero et al. [29] both found improved reading efficiency and comprehension with saliency-modulating text renderings.

In decision making, SAT argues that people tend to focus on alignable differences—features that can be directly compared—rather than on differences that cannot be easily aligned.

Structural Alignment Theory (SAT) [27] is a cognitive theory that explains how people make sense of concepts by comparing relational structures between two items.

Specifically, we use Variation Theory of learning [44] which states that for learning to occur, some aspects that define the concept being learned must vary while others are held constant.

According to SAT, humans compare two similar entities by trying to find structural alignments between them, and then comparing corresponding elements, with a special focus on differing aligned elements.

VT posits that human learning occurs when learners experience variation across critical and superficial aspects of a concept—through exposure to contrasting examples that systematically vary along different critical and superficial feature dimensions.

To analyze the annotation efficiency, we first conducted a Kruskal-Wallis rank sum test [39] to determine if there were statistically significant differences in annotation time across the three conditions, because our data violated the homogeneity of variances assumption, making non-parametric methods more appropriate.

Mohamed et al. (2020) put forth the idea of dismantling power assymmetries to resist data colonialism.

Couldry and Mejias (2019) propose 'data colonialism' as a new form of colonialism to make sense of the use of large amounts of data by a small group of corporate and government actors.

Interviews were video and audio recorded. We transcribed the audio using OpenAI's Whisper automatic speech recognition system and anonymized the transcript before analysis. We analyzed the interview data using thematic analysis [1]. First, two members of the research team independently coded four (25% of collected data) randomly chosen participant data to generate low-level codes. The inter-coder reliability between the coders was 0.88 using Krippendorff's alpha [37]. The two coders then met together to cross-check, resolve coding conflicts, and consolidate the codes into a codebook across two sessions. Using the codebook, the two coders analyzed six randomly selected participant data each. The research team then met, discussed the analysis outcomes, and finalized themes over three sessions.

We consider common sequences of chunk roles to be alignable structures that could be used to support users in identifying structural similarities and differences across sentences in different abstracts, in line with Structure-Mapping Theory [17].

Like prior Structural Mapping Theory (SMT)-informed work in text corpora representation, AbstractExplorer's features have enabled some users to see more of both the overview and the details at the same time, facilitating abstraction without losing context.

Our work demonstrates that designs informed by Structure-Mapping Theory can support users in navigating, making use of, and engaging with variation present in information.

According to SMT, this generalization depends on most documents having some shared implicit structure.

We process this data in a three-stage pipeline (Figure 6). In the first stage, Sentence Segmentation and Categorization, abstracts are split into individual sentences using the NLTK package, and each sentence is classified into one of the five pre-defined aspects as listed in Section 4.1.1. Classification is performed by prompting an LLM (see prompt used in Appendix D.1) with the sentence and its full abstract.

Then, we segment sentences within each aspect into grammar-preserving chunks (see prompt used in Appendix D.2). This results in grammatically coherent chunks that are the basis of structure patterns. After identifying chunk boundaries, we again prompt an LLM to generate labels for chunks in a human-in-the-loop approach: starting from an initial set of labels for chunk roles, when a new label is generated, a researcher from the research team examines the new label and merges it with existing labels if appropriate, controlling for the total number of labels.

In this study, we allowed participants to experience views of same-aspect sentences (Section 4.1.1) with different combinations of highlighting, ordering, and alignment (as described in Section 4.1.2 and Section 4.1.4) enabled or not, in order to understand which and/or what combinations most effectively supported users' ability to skim and read laterally across documents.

The revealed variation within these analogous cross-document relationships can invite the user’s engagement.

This is the essence of comparative close reading, a dialectical activity that requires repeated deep engagement with the texts to reveal new insights.

By definition, sensemaking and other dialectical activities necessitate engagement.

AbstractExplorer instantiates new minimally lossy2 SMT-informed techniques for skimming, reading, and reasoning about a corpus of similarly structured short documents: phrase-level role classification that drives sentence ordering, highlighting, and spatial alignment.

This SMT-informed approach, which AbstractExplorer shares, tries to give this mental machinery “a leg up,” letting users perhaps skip some steps by accepting reified cross-document relationships identified by the computer.

SMT posits that visual alignment helps people perceive relational similarities and differences more clearly, thereby improving their ability to make meaningful comparisons and understand underlying patterns.

The prior SMT-informed tools in Section 2.3 for both code and natural language corpora suggest that the cognitive process of comparing texts may be no exception to the cognitive processes SMT predicts.

SMT provides a framework for understanding how humans compare two or more objects by finding common structural alignments between objects.

Structural Mapping Theory (SMT) is a long-standing well-vetted theory from Cognitive Science that describes how humans attend to and try to compare objects by finding mental representations of them that can be structurally mapped to each other (analogies).

Theory (SMT) to facilitate seeing both the overview and the details at the same time, facilitating abstraction without losing context.

the context of a task (like perception, production, or induction) may change the effect of musical features.

Furthermore, as the method of reporting on perceived and induced affect may influence the construction of an affect (e.g., facilitating categorical perception), we also compare two different affect representations.

This research follows a constructionist approach to musical affect (Cespedes-Guevara & Eerola, 2018). That is, although we are interested in the \'bottom-up\' influence of certain musical features on musical affect, we believe these cannot be adequately evaluated without considering the \'top-down\' effects of context and individual differences that are present when affects are constructed. The perception or induction of affect does not merely arise in response to a stimulus but is also formed in relation to the individual and the context.

Given the high prevalence of such sounds in everyday life, having misophonia can have large negative effects on one's functioning in personal, academic, and work environments.

Although there are many idiosyncrasies in what may trigger a person with misophonia, the most common triggers are created by other humans, such as the sound of someone chewing, clearing their throat, tapping their foot, or typing on a keyboard.

Misophonia is a psychological disorder that is characterized by severe aversive responses to specific environmental sounds (i.e., triggers).

Composers and music researchers had previously analyzed and annotated 65 movements from the Classical, Romantic, and early Modern repertoire in terms of the Taxonomy of Orchestral Grouping Effects (McAdams et al., 2022).

In a study by McAdams and Goodchild (2018), orchestral simulations created with OrchSim were compared perceptually to commercial recordings and were shown to be of high quality.

Lembke, S.-A., Parker, K., Narmour, E., & McAdams, S. (2019). Acoustical correlates of perceptual blend in timbre dyads and triads. Musicae Scientiae, 23(2), 250–274.

Several other spectral and spectrotemporal descriptors were found to play a role in blend perception in orchestral works by Fischer et al. (2021).

Lembke and McAdams (2015) found that the degree of spectral overlap between constituent sounds enhanced blend perception.

Tardieu and McAdams (2012) extended this work with combinations of unison sustained and impulsive instruments (including pitched percussion and string pizzicati).

McAdams et al. (2022) introduce other notions related to blend as well.

This in turn creates an effect of perceptual unity (McAdams, 1989).

Four important concurrent grouping cues predict the perceptual fusion of sound events (McAdams, 1984): onset synchrony, harmonicity, coherent frequency behavior, and common spatial origin.

To this, McAdams et al. (2022) have added segmental grouping (chunking into perceptual units).

When the sudden drop to a pianissimo occurred towards the ending of the piece, the perceived arousal responses of CHM and WM dropped slightly but rose again immediately to end on a high arousal. These two groups of listeners appear to have anticipated a return to a loud and majestic close and therefore kept their arousal responses higher than those of the NM.

CHM, who are more experienced with the instruments and compositional techniques used in Chinese orchestral music, might have had an idea of which features figure more prominently in the communication of particular intentions, and therefore would have more information available for their judgments.

The perception of affective intentions in music is influenced by the degree of familiarity listeners have with a musical tradition, the content implicated in the music, and the complex sonic environment created by the composer's creation and the musicians' interpretation.

The version that participants heard was a premier of the work by the Taipei Chinese orchestra.

The communication of emotions or affect takes place when listeners perceive emotional meaning that is expressed by performers in music (Juslin, 2013a, 2013b).

An understanding of a tonal schema with its associations to happiness and sadness has been consistently found to influence listeners who have grown up in a culture of Western music.

Its mirmode function estimates the modal strength of the music in terms of ''majorness'' and ''minorness.''

The perception of consonance also plays an important role in the music listening process—combinations of tones that are consonant are perceived as more positively valenced than dissonant ones (Harrison & Pearce, 2020).

Musical structures such as pitch relations are perceptually salient and provide important information for listeners (e.g., Gabrielsson & Lindstrom, 2010; Krumhansl, 1998; Krumhansl & Kessler, 1982).

Through a within-subjects study with 12 participants comparing SemanticCommit to a chat-with-document baseline (OpenAI Canvas), we find differences in workflow: half of our participants adopted a workflow of impact analysis when using SemanticCommit, where they would first flag conflicts without AI revisions then resolve conflicts locally, despite having access to a global revision feature.

We implement the back-end using a knowledge-graph (KG) RAG architecture [36] consisting of two phases: pre-processing and inference.

In order to minimize relevance assessment issues, we apply a PageRank-based relevance ranking over the KG, akin to HippoRAG [36].

We compare our end-to-end system against two simpler methods: (i) DropAllDocs, which adds all documents to the context for conflict classification; and (ii) InkSync [56] which generates a JSON list of string-replace operations.

We run end-to-end on our four eval datasets using GPT-4o and GPT-4o-mini and report the mean ± stddev for accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 scores for the three approaches in Figure 5.

We conducted a controlled within-subjects study with mixed methods, comparing SemanticCommit with a baseline interface.

Both the order of task assignment and tool assignment were counterbalanced and randomly assigned.

Before each task, participants received a tutorial on the assigned tool and were given five minutes to explore it using a test document.

Each condition had a time limit of 15 minutes, after which the participant completed a post-task survey.

In the post-task surveys, we collected self-reported NASA Task Load Index (TLX) scores, Likert-scale ratings for ease of use, and responses on how well the AI helped participants identify, understand, and resolve semantic conflicts.

For qualitative analysis, the first author performed open coding on participant responses and audio transcripts to identify themes, which were used to interpret the qualitative results.

To measure statistical significance, we used Mann–Whitney–Wilcoxon tests and report the p-values.

We iterated on prompts using ChainForge [5] by setting up an evaluation pipeline against our datasets, which allowed us to observe the effects of prompt changes and model choices.

Our explorations went through substantial iterations and prompt prototyping over a period of eight months, evolving in response to two pilot studies and progressing from a card-based interface to a list of texts.

We ran one pilot study with five users of our card-based interface, and a second with four users of a revised interface.

Four coauthors created the evals, and two coauthors manually double-checked all conflicts, a process that took several days.

With participant consent, we recorded audio and screen-casts, and participants were encouraged to think aloud.

These semantic conflicts require dedicated support to detect, visualize, and resolve. Semantic conflict resolution interfaces must go beyond visualizing what changes were made, to what changes could be made, where they should be made, and what the effects might be. This resembles feedforward: affordances that help the user foresee the impact of an action [67, 93].

Today with LLMs, we are less limited by this constraint, and solutions to the problem of human-machine communication might be better found in cybernetics theory [9] than static formalism.

This reflects the principle of feedforward [67, 93] in communication theory—"a needed prescription or plan for a feedback, to which the actual feedback may or may not confirm" [79]—where a communicator provides "the context of what one was planning to talk about" [64, p. 179-80] in order to "pre-test the impact of [its output]" on the listener [34, p. 65].

adrinjalali approved these changes