NLP

Beyond Demographics: Fine-tuning Large Language Models to Predict Individuals' Subjective Text Perceptions

People naturally vary in their annotations for subjective questions and some of this variation is thought to be due to the person's sociodemographic characteristics. LLMs have also been used to label data, but recent work has shown that models …

Educators' Perceptions of Large Language Models as Tutors: Comparing Human and AI Tutors in a Blind Text-only Setting

The rapid development of Large Language Models (LLMs) opens up the possibility of using them aspersonal tutors. This has led to the development of several intelligent tutoring systems and learning assistants that use LLMs as back-ends with various …

Socially Aware Language Technologies: Perspectives and Practices

Language technologies have advanced substantially, particularly with the introduction of large language models. However, these advancements can exacerbate several issues that models have traditionally faced, including bias, evaluation, and risk. In …

Compromesso! Italian Many-Shot Jailbreaks Undermine the Safety of Large Language Models

As diverse linguistic communities and users adopt large language models (LLMs), assessing their safety across languages becomes critical. Despite ongoing efforts to make LLMs safe, they can still be made to behave unsafely with jailbreaking, a …

My Answer is C: First-Token Probabilities Do Not Match Text Answers in Instruction-Tuned Language Models

The open-ended nature of language generation makes the evaluation of autoregressive large language models (LLMs) challenging. One common evaluation approach uses multiple-choice questions to limit the response space. The model is then evaluated by …

Political Compass or Spinning Arrow? Towards More Meaningful Evaluations for Values and Opinions in Large Language Models

Much recent work seeks to evaluate values and opinions in large language models (LLMs) using multiple-choice surveys and questionnaires. Most of this work is motivated by concerns around real-world LLM applications. For example, politically-biased …

XSTest: A Test Suite for Identifying Exaggerated Safety Behaviours in Large Language Models

Without proper safeguards, large language models will readily follow malicious instructions and generate toxic content. This risk motivates safety efforts such as red-teaming and large-scale feedback learning, which aim to make models both helpful …

SafetyPrompts: a Systematic Review of Open Datasets for Evaluating and Improving Large Language Model Safety

The last two years have seen a rapid growth in concerns around the safety of large language models (LLMs). Researchers and practitioners have met these concerns by introducing an abundance of new datasets for evaluating and improving LLM safety. …

Classist Tools: Social Class Correlates with Performance in NLP

Since the foundational work of William Labov on the social stratification of language (Labov, 1964), linguistics has made concentrated efforts to explore the links between sociodemographic characteristics and language production and perception. But …

Impoverished Language Technology: The Lack of (Social) Class in NLP

Since Labov's (1964) foundational work on the social stratification of language, linguistics has dedicated concerted efforts towards understanding the relationships between socio-demographic factors and language production and perception. Despite the …