# Headlines You Won't Forget: Can Pronoun Insertion Increase Memorability?

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2604.19189 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.19189/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 10 of its 34 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 21 Apr 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 10 of 10)

- [GPT-4 Technical Report](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.08774/) (2023)
- [Sentence-BERT: Sentence Embeddings using Siamese BERT-Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1908.10084/) (2019)
- [A Prompt Pattern Catalog to Enhance Prompt Engineering with ChatGPT](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2302.11382/) (2023)
- [AI model GPT-3 (dis)informs us better than humans](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2301.11924/) (2023)
- [CoEdIT: Text Editing by Task-Specific Instruction Tuning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.09857/) (2023)
- [A Ship of Theseus: Curious Cases of Paraphrasing in LLM-Generated Texts](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.08374/) (2023)
- [LMentry: A Language Model Benchmark of Elementary Language Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2211.02069/) (2022)
- [Are Large Language Models Actually Good at Text Style Transfer?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.05885/) (2024)
- [HonestBait: Forward References for Attractive but Faithful Headline Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.14828/) (2023)
- [Which linguistic cues make people fall for fake news? A comparison of cognitive and affective processing](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2312.03751/) (2023)

## Abstract (arXiv)

For news headlines to influence beliefs and drive action, relevant information needs to be retained and retrievable from memory. In this probing study we draw on experiment designs from cognitive psychology to examine how a specific linguistic feature, namely direct address through first- and second-person pronouns, affects memorability and to what extent it is feasible to use large language models for the targeted insertion of such a feature into existing text without changing its core meaning. Across three controlled memorization experiments with a total of 240 participants, yielding 7,680 unique memory judgments, we show that pronoun insertion has mixed effects on memorability. Exploratory analyses indicate that effects differ based on headline topic, how pronouns are inserted and their immediate contexts. Additional data and fine-grained analysis is needed to draw definitive conclusions on these mediating factors. We further show that automatic revisions by LLMs are not always appropriate: Crowdsourced evaluations find many of them to be lacking in content accuracy and emotion retention or resulting in unnatural writing style. We make our collected data available for future work.