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arxiv: 2604.19189 · v1 · submitted 2026-04-21 · 💻 cs.CL

Headlines You Won't Forget: Can Pronoun Insertion Increase Memorability?

Selina Meyer (1) , Magdalena Abel (2) , Michael Roth (1) ((1) Natural Language Understanding Lab , University of Technology Nuremberg , (2) Cognitive Psychology Lab , University of Technology Nuremberg) This is my paper

Pith reviewed 2026-05-10 02:18 UTC · model grok-4.3

classification 💻 cs.CL
keywords pronoun insertionheadline memorabilitymemory experimentslarge language modelsnews headlineslinguistic featuresdirect addresscognitive psychology
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The pith

Pronoun insertion shows mixed effects on headline memorability.

A machine-rendered reading of the paper's core claim, the machinery that carries it, and where it could break.

The paper tests whether adding first- and second-person pronouns to news headlines makes them easier to remember. Three experiments with 240 participants and 7680 memory judgments show the changes produce inconsistent results that vary with topic, insertion style, and context. A reader would care because headlines must be retained in memory before they can shape beliefs or drive actions. The work also checks whether large language models can make these changes automatically while holding meaning and tone steady.

Core claim

The authors establish through controlled memorization experiments that pronoun insertion produces mixed effects on headline memorability, with exploratory results indicating that outcomes differ according to headline topic, how the pronouns are placed, and their immediate contexts. Crowdsourced ratings further show that large language model revisions for this purpose often lack content accuracy, fail to retain emotional tone, or result in unnatural phrasing.

What carries the argument

Direct address through first- and second-person pronouns inserted into headlines, measured by participant recall in controlled memorization tasks.

If this is right

  • Memorability effects vary with headline topic.
  • The specific method and context of pronoun insertion moderate whether recall improves.
  • Large language model revisions frequently fail to keep content accurate or style natural.
  • More detailed data and analysis are required to identify the factors that determine positive or negative outcomes.

Where Pith is reading between the lines

These are editorial extensions of the paper, not claims the author makes directly.

  • News writing guidelines could specify topic-dependent rules for adding direct address rather than applying it uniformly.
  • The same experimental approach could be used to test other linguistic changes for memory effects.
  • Limitations observed with automatic edits highlight the continuing need for human oversight when revising headlines for clarity.

Load-bearing premise

The pronoun insertions preserve the core meaning and emotional tone of the original headlines without introducing new interpretations that could independently affect memorability.

What would settle it

A replication study in which pronoun-inserted headlines produce reliably higher recall rates than originals across all topics and contexts, with exact meaning and tone preserved, would contradict the mixed-effects finding.

Figures

Figures reproduced from arXiv: 2604.19189 by (2) Cognitive Psychology Lab, Magdalena Abel (2), Michael Roth (1) ((1) Natural Language Understanding Lab, Selina Meyer (1), University of Technology Nuremberg, University of Technology Nuremberg).

Figure 1
Figure 1. Figure 1: An overview of our experiment design. We ask humans and LLMs to insert first and sec￾ond person pronouns in pre-existing news head￾lines. Participants are then shown headlines for a short time with the goal of memorizing them. In the examples shown, pronoun insertion considerably boosted recognition and recall. preliminary set of experiments that focus on the memorability of news headlines. In the course o… view at source ↗
Figure 2
Figure 2. Figure 2: Mean true positive rates of original and [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p003_2.png] view at source ↗
Figure 4
Figure 4. Figure 4: Increases/decreases in recall rate be￾tween original and revised headlines for insertions by nominal category, i.e. personal pronouns (“we”, “you”) and possessives with different nominal heads: Health/social (e.g. “your insurance”, “our babies”), Economy (e.g. “your dollars”, “our farmers”) and State/politics (e.g. “your country”, “our election”). 5. Conclusion In this paper, we present computational exper… view at source ↗
Figure 5
Figure 5. Figure 5: headline recognition likelihood given the [PITH_FULL_IMAGE:figures/full_fig_p014_5.png] view at source ↗
read the original abstract

For news headlines to influence beliefs and drive action, relevant information needs to be retained and retrievable from memory. In this probing study we draw on experiment designs from cognitive psychology to examine how a specific linguistic feature, namely direct address through first- and second-person pronouns, affects memorability and to what extent it is feasible to use large language models for the targeted insertion of such a feature into existing text without changing its core meaning. Across three controlled memorization experiments with a total of 240 participants, yielding 7,680 unique memory judgments, we show that pronoun insertion has mixed effects on memorability. Exploratory analyses indicate that effects differ based on headline topic, how pronouns are inserted and their immediate contexts. Additional data and fine-grained analysis is needed to draw definitive conclusions on these mediating factors. We further show that automatic revisions by LLMs are not always appropriate: Crowdsourced evaluations find many of them to be lacking in content accuracy and emotion retention or resulting in unnatural writing style. We make our collected data available for future work.

Editorial analysis

A structured set of objections, weighed in public.

Desk editor's note, referee report, simulated authors' rebuttal, and a circularity audit. Tearing a paper down is the easy half of reading it; the pith above is the substance, this is the friction.

Referee Report

2 major / 2 minor

Summary. The paper presents three controlled memorization experiments with 240 participants yielding 7,680 unique memory judgments to test whether inserting first- and second-person pronouns into news headlines increases memorability. It reports mixed effects that vary by headline topic, insertion method, and immediate context, while also showing that LLM-based pronoun insertions frequently fail crowdsourced checks for content accuracy, emotion retention, and natural style. The collected data is released for future work.

Significance. If the mixed-effects finding holds, the work adds empirical evidence on a targeted linguistic manipulation's impact on headline recall, bridging cognitive psychology and NLP with implications for journalism practice. The large participant pool and judgment count provide reasonable statistical power, the public data release supports reproducibility, and the hedged interpretation with explicit calls for more data on mediators is appropriately cautious.

major comments (2)
  1. [Results] Results section: the claim of mixed effects rests on exploratory analyses of topic and context moderators, but no specific interaction statistics, effect sizes, or correction for multiple comparisons are reported, making it hard to assess whether the variation is reliable or merely noise.
  2. [Methods] Methods section: the crowdsourced validation of LLM pronoun insertions for preserved core meaning and emotional tone lacks detail on the number of raters per item, rating scales, and inter-rater reliability metrics; without these, the conclusion that many insertions are inappropriate rests on an underspecified procedure.
minor comments (2)
  1. [Abstract] Abstract: the phrase 'mixed effects' could be accompanied by a brief indication of the predominant direction observed in at least one experiment to improve informativeness.
  2. [Discussion] Discussion: consider adding an explicit limitations paragraph addressing possible confounds such as changes in headline length or lexical diversity introduced by pronoun insertion.

Simulated Author's Rebuttal

2 responses · 0 unresolved

We thank the referee for their positive evaluation and recommendation for minor revision. We address each major comment below with clarifications and commitments to strengthen the manuscript.

read point-by-point responses

  1. Referee: [Results] Results section: the claim of mixed effects rests on exploratory analyses of topic and context moderators, but no specific interaction statistics, effect sizes, or correction for multiple comparisons are reported, making it hard to assess whether the variation is reliable or merely noise.

    Authors: We agree that the moderator analyses are exploratory and that reporting additional statistical details will improve transparency. In the revised manuscript we will include the specific interaction statistics from the mixed-effects models, report effect sizes, and apply corrections for multiple comparisons (e.g., FDR). We will also reinforce the exploratory framing and the call for confirmatory studies already present in the text. revision: yes

  2. Referee: [Methods] Methods section: the crowdsourced validation of LLM pronoun insertions for preserved core meaning and emotional tone lacks detail on the number of raters per item, rating scales, and inter-rater reliability metrics; without these, the conclusion that many insertions are inappropriate rests on an underspecified procedure.

    Authors: We acknowledge that the validation procedure requires more methodological detail. In the revision we will expand the Methods section to specify the number of raters per item, the exact rating scales used for accuracy, emotion retention, and naturalness, and the inter-rater reliability metrics computed. This will allow readers to better evaluate the strength of the evidence regarding LLM-generated insertions. revision: yes

Circularity Check

0 steps flagged

No circularity: purely empirical study based on participant data

full rationale

The paper presents results from three controlled memorization experiments involving 240 participants and 7,680 memory judgments. All central claims about mixed effects of pronoun insertion derive directly from observed human responses rather than from any equations, fitted parameters, derivations, or self-referential predictions. Exploratory analyses on mediating factors are explicitly labeled as such and do not reduce to the inputs by construction. LLM usage is limited to generating stimuli, with independent crowdsourced checks for accuracy and naturalness. No self-citation chains, uniqueness theorems, or ansatzes are invoked to support the core findings. The study is self-contained against external benchmarks of experimental data collection.

Axiom & Free-Parameter Ledger

0 free parameters · 1 axioms · 0 invented entities

The study rests on standard assumptions from experimental psychology about what controlled recall tasks measure; no free parameters, invented entities, or ad-hoc axioms are introduced.

axioms (1)
  • domain assumption Controlled presentation and recognition memory tasks accurately isolate the effect of pronoun insertion on memorability.
    Invoked in the design of the three experiments.

pith-pipeline@v0.9.0 · 5505 in / 1056 out tokens · 29808 ms · 2026-05-10T02:18:55.494486+00:00 · methodology

discussion (0)

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Reference graph

Works this paper leans on

15 extracted references · 15 canonical work pages · 3 internal anchors

  1. [1]

    Headlines You Won't Forget: Can Pronoun Insertion Increase Memorability?

    Introduction News research in NLP is often related to boosting engagement of news articles, as formalized by be- havioural data such as article dwell time (Davoudi et al., 2019), likes, retweets, quotes, or replies (Gopalakrishna Pillai et al., 2025; Park et al., 2021). Thisincludesworkongeneratingoreditingsuitable headlines or social media posts and miti...

    work page internal anchor Pith review Pith/arXiv arXiv 2019

  2. [2]

    Related Work Our work is related to text style transfer in that we manipulate one dimension of a text while preserv- ing its core meaning (Mukherjee et al., 2024), but differs in that we focus on a targeted manipulation rather than changing the overall style of a piece of text. Prior research has shown that despite LLMs’ generally impressive capabilities ...

    work page 2024

  3. [3]

    The findings suggest that personal pronouns help distinguish highly memorable content from less memorable items

    Methods We performed a linguistic analysis on Peña et al.’s data. The findings suggest that personal pronouns help distinguish highly memorable content from less memorable items. To test whether this effect holds with headlines alone, we conducted a pilot study using topic-balanced headlines with and with- out pronouns. The results indicated that headline...

    work page 2023

  4. [4]

    definitely false

    and consists of five phases: • PresentationPhase.Afterreadingandagree- ing to the informed consent, participants view a fixed number of news headlines for 10 sec- onds each in random order, with no additional content shown. They are instructed to memo- rize them. • Distraction Phase.Participants view and re- act to unrelated images for 60 seconds to re- d...

    work page 2024

  5. [5]

    our babies

    Results and Discussion We begin by outlining results regarding different LLMs’ performances at the pronoun insertion task defined above as judged by human annotators. Af- terthis,weelaborateontheresultsobtainedacross the three user studies and offer exploratory analy- ses to identify potential mediating effects between pronoun insertion and headline memor...

    work page 2023

  6. [6]

    We show that LLMs do not always insert pronouns appropri- ately, as indicated by crowdsourcing evaluations

    Conclusion In this paper, we present computational experi- mentstargetingaspecificlinguisticchange,namely the insertion of first- and second-person pronouns into news headlines, along with user studies ex- amining their effects on memorability. We show that LLMs do not always insert pronouns appropri- ately, as indicated by crowdsourcing evaluations. Coll...

    work page arXiv

  7. [7]

    In the future, we plan to develop computa- tional methods to make targeted changes, such as the ones presented, while changing as little as pos- sible of the remaining text

    Limitations We identify several limitations in this work, which we describe below: We are aware of potential interaction effects of other aspects related to pronoun insertion, such as increases in headline length or long words, changes in syntactic structure, or use of loaded language, which might be responsible for some headlines gaining a boost in memor...

    work page

  8. [8]

    academic, news) than in informal contexts (Tripto et al., 2024), LLM revisions in this context canpotentiallyintroducemisinformationandinaccu- racies

    Ethical Considerations Although previous research has found generative AIlesslikelytochangecontentandtoneoftheorigi- nal message when paraphrasing in formal contexts (e.g. academic, news) than in informal contexts (Tripto et al., 2024), LLM revisions in this context canpotentiallyintroducemisinformationandinaccu- racies. Topreventshowingmisinformationtopa...

    work page 2024

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    Bibliographical References Magdalena Abel and Karl-Heinz T Bäuml. 2023. Item-method directed forgetting and perceived truth of news headlines.Memory, 31(10):1371– 1386. Josh Achiam, Steven Adler, Sandhini Agar- wal, Lama Ahmad, Ilge Akkaya, Floren- cia Leoni Aleman, Diogo Almeida, Janko Al- tenschmidt,SamAltman,ShyamalAnadkat,etal

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    GPT-4 Technical Report

    Gpt-4 technical report.arXiv preprint arXiv:2303.08774. Xiang Ao, Xiting Wang, Ling Luo, Ying Qiao, Qing He, and Xing Xie. 2021. PENS: A dataset and generic framework for personalized news head- line generation. InProceedings of the 59th An- nual Meeting of the Association for Computa- tional Linguistics and the 11th International Joint Conference on Natu...

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    DeepSeek-V3 Technical Report

    Mixtral of experts. Aixin Liu, Bei Feng, Bing Xue, Bingxuan Wang, Bochao Wu, Chengda Lu, Chenggang Zhao, Chengqi Deng, Chenyu Zhang, Chong Ruan, et al. 2024. Deepseek-v3 technical report.arXiv preprint arXiv:2412.19437. Arle Richard Lommel, Aljoscha Burchardt, and Hans Uszkoreit. 2013. Multidimensional quality metrics: a flexible system for assessing tran...

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  12. [12]

    Accuracy: Does the content in the revised version accurately reflect the content of the source text? There are three ways, in which accuracy is com- monly violated, which can also occur together: • Misrepresentation: The revision misrepre- sentsinformationprovidedintheoriginalhead- line • Addition: The revision includes content not present in the original...

    work page

  13. [13]

    factual, dry information is paired with sensationalism) If a revision differs in tone or emotion compared to the original version, you can indicate this in a separate checkbox

    Style: Is the language style of the revised headline appropriate?Inappropriate style can manifest in various forms, that can also occur to- gether: •Grammar: The revision contains grammar or language errors • Awkward Style: The revision is grammatical, but unnatural as a news headline or awkward (e.g it involves excessive wordiness or overly embedded clau...

    work page

  14. [14]

    Does the content in the revised version accu- rately reflect the content of the source text? [x] Yes [ ] No

    work page

  15. [15]

    disturbing

    Is the language style of the revised headline appropriate? [x] Yes [ ] No [x] The revision differs in tone or emotion compared to the original Explanation: The headline is appropriate as a news headline and accurately reflects the content of the original headline. The addition of the word “disturbing” changes the emotional tone of the revision compared to...

    work page