Summarizing Diverging String Sequences, with Applications to Chain-Letter Petitions
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Algorithms to find optimal alignments among strings, or to find a parsimonious summary of a collection of strings, are well studied in a variety of contexts, addressing a wide range of interesting applications. In this paper, we consider chain letters, which contain a growing sequence of signatories added as the letter propagates. The unusual constellation of features exhibited by chain letters (one-ended growth, divergence, and mutation) make their propagation, and thus the corresponding reconstruction problem, both distinctive and rich. Here, inspired by these chain letters, we formally define the problem of computing an optimal summary of a set of diverging string sequences. From a collection of these sequences of names, with each sequence noisily corresponding to a branch of the unknown tree $T$ representing the letter's true dissemination, can we efficiently and accurately reconstruct a tree $T' \approx T$? In this paper, we give efficient exact algorithms for this summarization problem when the number of sequences is small; for larger sets of sequences, we prove hardness and provide an efficient heuristic algorithm. We evaluate this heuristic on synthetic data sets chosen to emulate real chain letters, showing that our algorithm is competitive with or better than previous approaches, and that it also comes close to finding the true trees in these synthetic datasets.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.011 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.006 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".