Paper Detail
Christoph Wigbels, Ali Abusaleh, Markus T. Jansen, Alexander Mehler, Manuel Schaaf, Markus J. Hofmann
This study examines whether individual text corpora (ICs) from search histories can be used to simulate individual knowledge. We collected ICs from 316 adults, who answered 36 multiple-choice knowledge items, and compared several large language models (LLMs) on this task, of which only Qwen3-1.7B proved viable. After task-specific fine-tuning via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Qwen3-1.7B outperformed both participants and a representative German norm sample on publicly available items. On non-public questions, however, the LLM performed worse than our participants, suggesting possible training data contamination for the public questions. When integrating ICs into retrieval-augmented generation to predict individual responses, LLM-participant Match accuracies significantly exceeded chance, which demonstrates a detectable individual knowledge signal. The probabilities assigned to the participants' answers were, however, low and far below the probability of correct answers, indicating poor calibration toward individual response patterns. Knowledge-gap prediction was sub-optimal, though it improved for corpora exceeding five million tokens. We discuss our entropy based evaluation benchmarks as calibration indices for individualized knowledge simulation.
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@article{wigbels2026individual,
title = {Individual Text Corpora Predict User-Specific Knowledge: Benchmarks of Individualized Knowledge Simulation},
author = {Christoph Wigbels and Ali Abusaleh and Markus T. Jansen and Alexander Mehler and Manuel Schaaf and Markus J. Hofmann},
year = {2026},
abstract = {This study examines whether individual text corpora (ICs) from search histories can be used to simulate individual knowledge. We collected ICs from 316 adults, who answered 36 multiple-choice knowledge items, and compared several large language models (LLMs) on this task, of which only Qwen3-1.7B proved viable. After task-specific fine-tuning via Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Qwen3-1.7B outperformed both participants and a representative German norm sample on publicly available items. On non-publi},
url = {https://arxiv.org/abs/2609.08532},
keywords = {cs.IR},
eprint = {2609.08532},
archiveprefix = {arXiv},
}
{}