Count Evidence, Not Sentences: Tempered Evidence Fusion of LLM Judgments for Long-Text Value Measurement
Abstract: Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to measure public value orientations from long social media posts, yet such posts often mix background, quotations, concessions, and only a few stance-bearing sentences. Existing approaches either ask the model to predict a document-level label directly, which can be overconfident, or aggregate sentence-level predictions by majority or soft voting, which treat uncertain and decisive sentences as equally informative. We formulate long-text value measurement as a decision-fusion problem and propose Tempered Evidence Fusion (TEF), a training-free rule that weights each sentence's log-odds by its normalized information gain, as derived from a generalized Bayesian posterior. This makes the fused score nearly vanish for uncertain sentences while preserving the Bayes-optimal weight of decisive evidence. We further introduce Multi-event Insight Network Dimensions (MIND), a benchmark of 8,358 Chinese and English posts spanning five years of public events and six value dimensions. On MIND, TEF outperforms the strongest baseline among Direct, Majority Vote, and Soft Vote by an average of 4.5 accuracy points and 4.6 macro-F1 points across five LLMs and two languages. MIND dataset and code are available at https://github.com/Kzczc/ICASSP2027-TEF.