Slogans or Stance? A Label-Light Diagnostic for Entrepreneurial-Discourse Measurement on Chinese SOE Speeches

Computational social science increasingly relies on automated preprocessing pipelines -- speaker diarization, ASR transcript cleaning, sentence segmentation -- to convert raw media into analyzable text. When these pipelines produce different outputs from the same input, two distinct sources of instability can arise: the preprocessing pipeline itself (diarization method, segmentation rules) and the downstream measurement instrument (LLM annotation vs.\ keyword lexicon). Using 256 YouTube interviews across 41 public figures from five domains, we compare two speaker-diarization pipelines and two measurement methods, all targeting the coupling between affective valence and epistemic modality. We find that (1) preprocessing pipeline sensitivity is concentrated in speakers with limited video samples (N $\leq 5$); for the four best-sampled speakers (N $\geq 16$), the mean absolute pipeline-induced change in $r(\text{neg}, \text{emph})$ is only $0.13$; (2) cross-method disagreement is larger and more systematic -- the LLM and keyword-lexicon methods assign opposite coupling directions to several well-sampled speakers, even within the same preprocessing pipeline; and (3) aggregate valence proportions are highly stable ($|Δp(\text{neg})| < 6$pp) regardless of pipeline or method, masking both sources of instability. The contribution is a diagnostic framework that separates pipeline effects from measurement effects: researchers studying cross-dimensional relationships in interview data should verify that their conclusions are robust to both sources of variation, with particular attention to measurement method choice.

Automated L2 speech assessment can assign proficiency labels, but often lacks interpretability. We propose a rubric-guided SpeechLLM for multi-aspect, multi-granular assessment, trained with a hybrid objective combining supervised fine-tuning and Bounded Direct Preference Optimization. The model jointly predicts ordinal labels at the sentence-level (accuracy, fluency, prosody), word/phoneme-level accuracy, and generates a natural-language rationale in the same response. On SpeechOcean762, our approach matches or outperforms single-granularity models while remaining competitive with prior approaches. We analyze rationale reliability along two axes: self-consistency with model predictions and alignment with ground-truth labels, using sentiment consistency (plausibility) and mention-based agreement (faithfulness). Rationales are plausible at the sentence level, but faithfulness degrades at the word/phoneme level: references are sparse and weakly aligned with token-level labels.

Can a statistically significant, large-effect-size finding in computational social science be entirely an artifact of the measurement instrument? We present a case where the answer appears to be yes. Analyzing 85 interviews across four public intellectuals (2016--2026), we find a robust negative-affect/emphatic-certainty lexical co-occurrence pattern under keyword-based scoring ($r = 0.72$--$0.93$, $p < 0.01$ for all four speakers). Replacing keyword counting with LLM-based zero-shot semantic classification on the complete diarized corpus (32,625 sentences) dramatically reduces this correlation: Dalio's $r = 0.851$ drops to $r = 0.206$, with two speakers showing negative $r(\text{neg}, \text{emphatic})$ and one showing null. In contrast, the LLM reveals a strong negative-hedging coupling across speakers -- Rogoff's $r(\text{neg}, \text{hedged}) = 0.875$ ($p = 0.001$) and Zeihan's $r(\text{neg}, \text{hedged}) = 0.722$ ($p = 0.008$) -- consistent with the conventional expectation that pessimistic discourse attracts hedging, not certainty. Sentence-level error analysis traces this discrepancy to three structural failure modes in keyword lexicons -- syntactic blindness, polysemy blindness, and categorical absence -- illustrated through cases where keyword counting inverts semantic meaning (e.g., ''never absolutely totally confident'' scored as high-certainty). We argue that keyword lexicons measure a universal lexical co-occurrence tendency -- negative discourse naturally attracts emphatic vocabulary -- that is orthogonal to, and can systematically invert, rhetorical stance. Treating keyword counts as measurements of epistemic certainty is a category error: a finding that appears to be about a speaker's psychology may be entirely about the counting of words.