POLAR:A Per-User Association Test in Embedding Space

Abstract

Most intrinsic association probes operate at the word, sentence, or corpus level, obscuring author-level variation. We present POLAR (Per-user On-axis Lexical Association Re-port), a per-user lexical association test that runs in the embedding space of a lightly adapted masked language model. Authors are represented by private deterministic to-kens; POLAR projects these vectors onto curated lexicalaxes and reports standardized effects with permutation p-values and Benjamini--Hochberg control. On a balanced bot--human Twitter benchmark, POLAR cleanly separates LLM-driven bots from organic accounts; on an extremist forum,it quantifies strong alignment with slur lexicons and reveals rightward drift over time. The method is modular to new attribute sets and provides concise, per-author diagnostics for computational social science. All code is publicly avail-able at https://github.com/pedroaugtb/POLAR-A-Per-User-Association-Test-in-Embedding-Space.