aiqbench analysis
This research applies zero-shot LLMs (Qwen2.5, Mistral) to detect shared experiential patterns in migration narratives without annotated training data, evaluating various feature engineering strategies against expert judgments. While the study demonstrates that hybrid models can improve correlation with human annotations, it highlights current limitations where surface-level and embedding-based methods struggle to capture deep semantic echoes of lived experiences across different geographic routes.
Detecting Experiential Intertextuality Across Migration Routes: Beyond Surface Similarity in French Narratives
arXiv:2607.29188v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Migrants traversing geographically distinct routes such as the Trans-Saharan and Balkan corridors often recount strikingly parallel lived experiences: police violence, smuggler exploitation, dangerous crossings, and family separation. We introduce the task of experiential intertextuality detection: automatically identifying shared experiential echoes across migration narratives without requiring annotated training data. From 108 French migration narratives spanning both corridors, we automatically generate sentence pairs and score them using annotation-free methods: lexical baselines, sentence embeddings, POS-based structural features, a migration-specific theme lexicon, context-aware narrative features, and zero-shot LLM scoring with Qwen2.5-7B and Mistral-7B under three prompting strategies. We validate all methods against 816 expert-annotated intertextuality judgments (inter-annotator Krippendorff's $\alpha = 0.27$). Our results reveal that all surface, structural, and embedding methods correlate only weakly with expert judgments ($r \leq 0.30$); Qwen2.5-7B zero-shot achieves the best single-method correlation ($r = 0.38$); few-shot examples degrade Qwen but dramatically improve Mistral; narrative position significantly predicts intertextuality, with departure-phase pairs showing the highest experiential echoes; and a supervised hybrid combining all 31 features achieves $r = 0.45$, a 21% improvement over the best individual method.
Abstract:Migrants traversing geographically distinct routes such as the Trans-Saharan and Balkan corridors often recount strikingly parallel lived experiences: police violence, smuggler exploitation, dangerous crossings, and family separation. We introduce the task of experiential intertextuality detection: automatically identifying shared experiential echoes across migration narratives without requiring annotated training data. From 108 French migration narratives spanning both corridors, we automatically generate sentence pairs and score them using annotation-free methods: lexical baselines, sentence embeddings, POS-based structural features, a migration-specific theme lexicon, context-aware narrative features, and zero-shot LLM scoring with Qwen2.5-7B and Mistral-7B under three prompting strategies. We validate all methods against 816 expert-annotated intertextuality judgments (inter-annotator Krippendorff's $\alpha = 0.27$). Our results reveal that all surface, structural, and embedding methods correlate only weakly with expert judgments ($r \leq 0.30$); Qwen2.5-7B zero-shot achieves the best single-method correlation ($r = 0.38$); few-shot examples degrade Qwen but dramatically improve Mistral; narrative position significantly predicts intertextuality, with departure-phase pairs showing the highest experiential echoes; and a supervised hybrid combining all 31 features achieves $r = 0.45$, a 21% improvement over the best individual method.
11 pages, 3 figures, 5 tables. Accepted at SIGDIAL 2026 (27th Annual Meeting of the Special Interest Group on Discourse and Dialogue)
Computation and Language (cs.CL)
arXiv:2607.29188 [cs.CL]
(or arXiv:2607.29188v1 [cs.CL] for this version)
https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2607.29188 Focus to learn more arXiv-issued DOI via DataCite (pending registration)
https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2026.sigdial-1.NN Focus to learn more DOI(s) linking to related resources
arXivLabs is a framework that allows collaborators to develop and share new arXiv features directly on our website.
Both individuals and organizations that work with arXivLabs have embraced and accepted our values of openness, community, excellence, and user data privacy. arXiv is committed to these values and only works with partners that adhere to them.
Have an idea for a project that will add value for arXiv's community? Learn more about arXivLabs.
Full text under the publisher's open licence · 304 words
Related coverage
How GoDaddy transformed its analytics with Amazon Quick
AWS · Aug 26, 2026
[AINews] Reality Checks on AI News (Yegge shuts down Gas Town, Databricks’ +60% Astra cost)
Latent Space · Sep 17, 2026
Natera’s intelligent appointment scheduling with Amazon Bedrock AgentCore
AWS · Aug 26, 2026
Amazon Research Awards recipients announced
Amazon Science · May 27, 2026