PRAXIS: A 68-Industry Benchmark for Pragmatic-Form Bias in Suggestion Mining

Aniket Upadhyay, Aakash Trivedi, Sparsh Bajoria, Shreyanshu Ranjan, Dhruv Kumar, Pratik Narang


Abstract
Suggestion mining has traditionally been formulated as binary classification, but the underlying linguistic phenomenon is not binary. A single review can express the same operational recommendation through a direct imperative (e.g., “add a vegetarian entrée”), an optative wish, an interrogative request, or a hedged conditional. These utterances share illocutionary force but differ substantially in pragmatic form, placing different demands on models: lexical cues may suffice for direct suggestions, whereas indirect forms require pragmatic interpretation. Existing benchmarks, typically spanning one to five domains and using a single binary label, do not measure these distinctions.

We introduce PRAXIS, an English consumer-review benchmark that reframes suggestion mining as the measurement of pragmatic-form bias rather than as a leaderboard task. PRAXIS provides (i) a silver corpus of 174,860 reviews spanning 68 industries, labeled by Claude Opus 4.7; (ii) a 15,000-example human-labeled gold evaluation set, with annotation reliability estimated by a three-annotator panel on a 1,000-example subset (Tier 1 Fleiss’ κ = 0.77); and (iii) evaluations of four model families against the human gold, with bootstrap 95% confidence intervals. Agreement between Opus and human labels is reported separately as a corpus-validation statistic (Tier 1 Cohen’s κ = 0.71), rather than as inter-annotator agreement.

Our central finding is structural rather than competitive. Instruction-tuned LLMs outperform encoders on binary macro-F1 (DeepSeek-V4-Pro: 0.882 vs. RoBERTa-large: 0.780), yet the ranking reverses for the Tier 1 conditional form: RoBERTa-large recalls 85.2% of conditional suggestions, compared with 46.7% for the strongest zero-shot LLM and 8.0–43.1% for the other six LLMs. This discrepancy reflects a form-classification gap rather than a detection gap: models often recognize these instances as suggestions at the binary level but misclassify their pragmatic form. A matched-supervision QLoRA model based on Qwen2.5-7B, trained on the same silver labels used for the encoders, recovers encoder-level conditional recall (0.904). PRAXIS therefore exposes a structural error mode that flat binary metrics obscure, positioning the benchmark as a measurement instrument for pragmatic-form bias rather than a conventional model leaderboard.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.741
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
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Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
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SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
15566–15586
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.741/
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Cite (ACL):
Aniket Upadhyay, Aakash Trivedi, Sparsh Bajoria, Shreyanshu Ranjan, Dhruv Kumar, and Pratik Narang. 2026. PRAXIS: A 68-Industry Benchmark for Pragmatic-Form Bias in Suggestion Mining. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 15566–15586, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PRAXIS: A 68-Industry Benchmark for Pragmatic-Form Bias in Suggestion Mining (Upadhyay et al., Findings 2026)
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https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.741.pdf