← 研踪 PaperTrailarXiv:2610.35461 · v1
A Contextual Measure of Ambiguity in Prescriptive Text
首次提交 2026-10-26 21:56
版本更新 2026-10-26 21:56
雷达观测 2026-10-29 00:35
摘要
Ambiguity in prescriptive text such as laws, contracts, rules, policies, or recommendations can be both desirable (e.g., if it enables a law to adapt to changing context, such as new technologies) and undesirable (e.g., if it leads to arbitrary discretion or conflict over the law's interpretation). To help navigate these trade-offs, it would be valuable to have methods for quantifying ambiguity that are predictive of such outcomes, but existing measures capture how text is perceived in isolation rather than how it is interpreted in context. In this paper, we propose quantifying ambiguity as the degree of disagreement among a set of stakeholders ("raters") on how alternative prescriptive texts ("policies") apply in each of a set of relevant scenarios ("cases"). Using two policy domains, we present preliminary analysis suggesting that, even when using simulated raters, this approach (i) correlates with real human disagreement, and (ii) is robust to spurious text features. We then apply the measure to existing deliberation datasets to describe the association between policy ambiguity and support for those policies.
作者备注：10 pages, EMNLP 2026
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v1 · 2026-10-26 21:56 · 最新观测版本
A Contextual Measure of Ambiguity in Prescriptive Text
Ambiguity in prescriptive text such as laws, contracts, rules, policies, or recommendations can be both desirable (e.g., if it enables a law to adapt to changing context, such as new technologies) and undesirable (e.g., if it leads to arbitrary discretion or conflict over the law's interpretation). To help navigate these trade-offs, it would be valuable to have methods for quantifying ambiguity that are predictive of such outcomes, but existing measures capture how text is perceived in isolation rather than how it is interpreted in context. In this paper, we propose quantifying ambiguity as the degree of disagreement among a set of stakeholders ("raters") on how alternative prescriptive texts ("policies") apply in each of a set of relevant scenarios ("cases"). Using two policy domains, we present preliminary analysis suggesting that, even when using simulated raters, this approach (i) correlates with real human disagreement, and (ii) is robust to spurious text features. We then apply the measure to existing deliberation datasets to describe the association between policy ambiguity and support for those policies.
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