New press release about our recently released COLM paper, work by Katherine Van Koevering! hub.jhu.edu/2026/09/21/a... Check out the full paper here: arxiv.org/abs/2608.13328
- Prompts using hedges, tag questions, and collective reference drew shorter, less sophisticated, less formal LLM replies across three document types and four models.
- Linguistic register outweighed explicit cues like sign-off names in shaping response quality, according to the paper's representational analysis.
- The authors report the effect is encoded in early transformer layers and entangled with other features, making post-hoc mitigation difficult.