{"ID":2842755,"CreatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","UpdatedAt":"2026-06-01T04:54:23.091178241Z","DeletedAt":null,"paper_url":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09185","arxiv_id":"2511.09185","title":"Context is Enough: Empirical Validation of $\\textit{Sequentiality}$ on Essays","abstract":"Recent work has proposed using Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantify narrative flow through a measure called sequentiality, which combines topic and contextual terms. A recent critique argued that the original results were confounded by how topics were selected for the topic-based component, and noted that the metric had not been validated against ground-truth measures of flow. That work proposed using only the contextual term as a more conceptually valid and interpretable alternative. In this paper, we empirically validate that proposal. Using two essay datasets with human-annotated trait scores, ASAP++ and ELLIPSE, we show that the contextual version of sequentiality aligns more closely with human assessments of discourse-level traits such as Organization and Cohesion. While zero-shot prompted LLMs predict trait scores more accurately than the contextual measure alone, the contextual measure adds more predictive value than both the topic-only and original sequentiality formulations when combined with standard linguistic features. Notably, this combination also outperforms the zero-shot LLM predictions, highlighting the value of explicitly modeling sentence-to-sentence flow. Our findings support the use of context-based sequentiality as a validated, interpretable, and complementary feature for automated essay scoring and related NLP tasks.","short_abstract":"Recent work has proposed using Large Language Models (LLMs) to quantify narrative flow through a measure called sequentiality, which combines topic and contextual terms. A recent critique argued that the original results were confounded by how topics were selected for the topic-based component, and noted that the metri...","url_abs":"https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.09185","url_pdf":"https://arxiv.org/pdf/2511.09185v1","authors":"[\"Amal Sunny\",\"Advay Gupta\",\"Vishnu Sreekumar\"]","published":"2025-11-12T10:31:07Z","proceeding":"cs.CL","tasks":"[\"cs.CL\"]","methods":"[\"Large Language Model\",\"Language Model\",\"Generative Adversarial Network\"]","has_code":false}