Paper

Measuring Perceptions of Personhood with Semantic Proto-role Properties

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Abstract

We show that semantic proto-role properties can be used as a tool to measure implicit human perceptions of agency and patiency of entities in human-generated text. First, we demonstrate that silver-generated semantic proto-role property labels are strongly correlated with both human judgment and a probabilistic text-based measure of anthropomorphism. Then, we use our measure to quantify linguistic idiosyncrasies across different AI-related Reddit communities. Our measure shows that subreddits dedicated to discussing AI companionship ascribe higher sentience to "bots" and higher agency to "companies" when compared to other subreddits. This phenomenon reveals not only the unique way in which chatbots are anthropomorphized in such subreddits, but also the users' keen awareness of their power imbalance with the companies that created the chatbots.

Keywords: NLP tools for social analysis, semantics, language/cultural bias analysis, semantic proto-roles, semantic proto-role labeling, semantic role labeling, event extraction

How to Cite:

Hoefer, E. S. & Martin, J., (2026) “Measuring Perceptions of Personhood with Semantic Proto-role Properties”, Society for Computation in Linguistics 9(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.7275/scil.4014