Zero-shot narrative detection in social messaging
This study investigates the zero-shot ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify and classify hidden narratives in social messages.
Why am I seeing this Ranked on source trust — arXiv
It ranks mainly on source trust: arXiv is the most reliable outlet we track on this subject, and is the only one on the story so far.
The classifier could not identify the subject from the text, so the section was inherited from the source feed. We do not summarise what we cannot identify — this one links straight out.
Link-outLink-out, because the subject could not be identified from the text. Link-out means we point at the publisher and say nothing of our own.
| Factor | Weight | Score | Contribution | Where it came from |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Corroboration | 0.35 | 0.39 | +0.135 34% | 1 independent org on the story. Tier-3 aggregators never corroborate — they can show something is circulating, never that it is true. |
| Source trustleads | 0.25 | 0.85 | +0.212 53% | arXiv is the highest-trust source on this story and is first-party — the organisation announcing its own news. Trust is taken from the best source, not averaged. |
| Pickup rate | 0.20 | 0.00 | +0.000 0% | One counted organisation, so there is no spread to measure — nothing has picked this up to set a rate. |
| Freshness | 0.20 | 0.27 | +0.054 14% | Halves every 10 hours from the newest item on the story. This is the only factor that rewards a story for nothing more than being recent. |
Corroboration counts distinct organisations, once each, and only from tiers 1 and 2. Freshness halves every 10 hours, so this ranking is a snapshot and will differ at the next build.

What happened
This study investigates the zero-shot ability of large language models (LLMs) to identify and classify hidden narratives in social messages. Our research hypothesis is that LLMs' extensive contextual knowledge allows them to interpret messages on a deeper, pragmatic level, going beyond basic sentiment or topic analysis. Experiments on the Dipromats and SemEval datasets show that providing models with human-written narrative descriptions significantly improves performance, without the need of training examples. In contrast, automatically generated descriptions or the use of few examples (few-shot) often degrade accuracy due to subtle shifts in framing.
How this story arrived
Ordered by when each source was first observed, which is what the velocity figure is computed from. Publishers backdate; observed order does not.
- 01 Arxivfirst-party first seen Zero-shot narrative detection in social messaging
Overclock clusters coverage from independent sources and grades it automatically. The figures above are computed, not editorial. This page summarises and links to reporting by the outlets named — follow the links for the original work.