''Fifty Shades of Bias'': Normative Ratings of Gender Bias in GPT Generated English Text

Language serves as a powerful tool for the manifestation of societal belief systems. In doing so, it also perpetuates the prevalent biases in our society. Gender bias is one of the most pervasive biases in our society and is seen in online and offline discourses. With LLMs increasingly gaining human-like fluency in text generation, gaining a nuanced understanding of the biases these systems can generate is imperative. Prior work often treats gender bias as a binary classification task. However, acknowledging that bias must be perceived at a relative scale; we investigate the generation and consequent receptivity of manual annotators to bias of varying degrees. Specifically, we create the first dataset of GPT-generated English text with normative ratings of gender bias. Ratings were obtained using Best--Worst Scaling -- an efficient comparative annotation framework. Next, we systematically analyze the variation of themes of gender biases in the observed ranking and show that identity-attack is most closely related to gender bias. Finally, we show the performance of existing automated models trained on related concepts on our dataset.Comment: Camera-ready version in EMNLP 202

Ruddit: Norms of Offensiveness for English Reddit Comments

On social media platforms, hateful and offensive language negatively impact the mental well-being of users and the participation of people from diverse backgrounds. Automatic methods to detect offensive language have largely relied on datasets with categorical labels. However, comments can vary in their degree of offensiveness. We create the first dataset of English language Reddit comments that has fine-grained, real-valued scores between -1 (maximally supportive) and 1 (maximally offensive). The dataset was annotated using Best--Worst Scaling, a form of comparative annotation that has been shown to alleviate known biases of using rating scales. We show that the method produces highly reliable offensiveness scores. Finally, we evaluate the ability of widely-used neural models to predict offensiveness scores on this new dataset.Comment: Camera-ready version in ACL 202

Are Large Language Model-based Evaluators the Solution to Scaling Up Multilingual Evaluation?

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance on Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks, such as Question Answering, Summarization, and Classification. The use of LLMs as evaluators, that can rank or score the output of other models (usually LLMs) has become increasingly popular, due to the limitations of current evaluation techniques including the lack of appropriate benchmarks, metrics, cost, and access to human annotators. While LLMs are capable of handling approximately 100 languages, the majority of languages beyond the top 20 lack systematic evaluation across various tasks, metrics, and benchmarks. This creates an urgent need to scale up multilingual evaluation to ensure a precise understanding of LLM performance across diverse languages. LLM-based evaluators seem like the perfect solution to this problem, as they do not require human annotators, human-created references, or benchmarks and can theoretically be used to evaluate any language covered by the LLM. In this paper, we investigate whether LLM-based evaluators can help scale up multilingual evaluation. Specifically, we calibrate LLM-based evaluation against 20k human judgments of five metrics across three text-generation tasks in eight languages. Our findings indicate that LLM-based evaluators may exhibit bias towards higher scores and should be used with caution and should always be calibrated with a dataset of native speaker judgments, particularly in low-resource and non-Latin script languages

Viewpoint Diversity in Search Results

Adverse phenomena such as the search engine manipulation effect (SEME), where web search users change their attitude on a topic following whatever most highly-ranked search results promote, represent crucial challenges for research and industry. However, the current lack of automatic methods to comprehensively measure or increase viewpoint diversity in search results complicates the understanding and mitigation of such effects. This paper proposes a viewpoint bias metric that evaluates the divergence from a pre-defined scenario of ideal viewpoint diversity considering two essential viewpoint dimensions (i.e., stance and logic of evaluation). In a case study, we apply this metric to actual search results and find considerable viewpoint bias in search results across queries, topics, and search engines that could lead to adverse effects such as SEME. We subsequently demonstrate that viewpoint diversity in search results can be dramatically increased using existing diversification algorithms. The methods proposed in this paper can assist researchers and practitioners in evaluating and improving viewpoint diversity in search results.</p

Evaluating explainable social choice-based aggregation strategies for group recommendation

Social choice aggregation strategies have been proposed as an explainable way to generate recommendations to groups of users. However, it is not trivial to determine the best strategy to apply for a specific group. Previous work highlighted that the performance of a group recommender system is affected by the internal diversity of the group members’ preferences. However, few of them have empirically evaluated how the specific distribution of preferences in a group determines which strategy is the most effective. Furthermore, only a few studies evaluated the impact of providing explanations for the recommendations generated with social choice aggregation strategies, by evaluating explanations and aggregation strategies in a coupled way. To fill these gaps, we present two user studies (N=399 and N=288) examining the effectiveness of social choice aggregation strategies in terms of users’ fairness perception, consensus perception, and satisfaction. We study the impact of the level of (dis-)agreement within the group on the performance of these strategies. Furthermore, we investigate the added value of textual explanations of the underlying social choice aggregation strategy used to generate the recommendation. The results of both user studies show no benefits in using social choice-based explanations for group recommendations. However, we find significant differences in the effectiveness of the social choice-based aggregation strategies in both studies. Furthermore, the specific group configuration (i.e., various scenarios of internal diversity) seems to determine the most effective aggregation strategy. These results provide useful insights on how to select the appropriate aggregation strategy for a specific group based on the level of (dis-)agreement within the group members’ preferences

MEGAVERSE: Benchmarking Large Language Models Across Languages, Modalities, Models and Tasks

Recently, there has been a rapid advancement in research on Large Language Models (LLMs), resulting in significant progress in several Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks. Consequently, there has been a surge in LLM evaluation research to comprehend the models' capabilities and limitations. However, much of this research has been confined to the English language, leaving LLM building and evaluation for non-English languages relatively unexplored. There has been an introduction of several new LLMs, necessitating their evaluation on non-English languages. This study aims to expand our MEGA benchmarking suite by including six new datasets to form the MEGAVERSE benchmark. The benchmark comprises 22 datasets covering 81 languages, including low-resource African languages. We evaluate several state-of-the-art LLMs like GPT-3.5-Turbo, GPT4, PaLM2, and Llama2 on the MEGAVERSE datasets. Additionally, we include two multimodal datasets in the benchmark and assess the performance of the LLaVa-v1.5 model. Our experiments suggest that GPT4 and PaLM2 outperform the Llama models on various tasks, notably on low-resource languages, with GPT4 outperforming PaLM2 on more datasets than vice versa. However, issues such as data contamination must be addressed to obtain an accurate assessment of LLM performance on non-English languages.Comment: 23 pages, 30 figures and 1 tabl

MEGA: Multilingual Evaluation of Generative AI

Generative AI models have shown impressive performance on many Natural Language Processing tasks such as language understanding, reasoning, and language generation. An important question being asked by the AI community today is about the capabilities and limits of these models, and it is clear that evaluating generative AI is very challenging. Most studies on generative LLMs have been restricted to English and it is unclear how capable these models are at understanding and generating text in other languages. We present the first comprehensive benchmarking of generative LLMs - MEGA, which evaluates models on standard NLP benchmarks, covering 16 NLP datasets across 70 typologically diverse languages. We compare the performance of generative LLMs including Chat-GPT and GPT-4 to State of the Art (SOTA) non-autoregressive models on these tasks to determine how well generative models perform compared to the previous generation of LLMs. We present a thorough analysis of the performance of models across languages and tasks and discuss challenges in improving the performance of generative LLMs on low-resource languages. We create a framework for evaluating generative LLMs in the multilingual setting and provide directions for future progress in the field.Comment: EMNLP 202

Beyond Digital "Echo Chambers": the Role of Viewpoint Diversity in Political Discussion

Increasingly taking place in online spaces, modern political conversations are typically perceived to be unproductively affirming---siloed in so called "echo chambers" of exclusively like-minded discussants. Yet, to date we lack sufficient means to measure viewpoint diversity in conversations. To this end, in this paper, we operationalize two viewpoint metrics proposed for recommender systems and adapt them to the context of social media conversations. This is the first study to apply these two metrics (Representation and Fragmentation) to real world data and to consider the implications for online conversations specifically. We apply these measures to two topics---daylight savings time (DST), which serves as a control, and the more politically polarized topic of immigration. We find that the diversity scores for both Fragmentation and Representation are lower for immigration than for DST. Further, we find that while pro-immigrant views receive consistent pushback on the platform, anti-immigrant views largely operate within echo chambers. We observe less severe yet similar patterns for DST. Taken together, Representation and Fragmentation paint a meaningful and important new picture of viewpoint diversity