Collecting Qualitative Data at Scale with Large Language Models: A Case Study

Fuente: arXiv
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Auteurs principaux: Cuevas, Alejandro, Scurrell, Jennifer V., Brown, Eva M., Entenmann, Jason, Daepp, Madeleine I. G.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2023
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author Cuevas, Alejandro
Scurrell, Jennifer V.
Brown, Eva M.
Entenmann, Jason
Daepp, Madeleine I. G.
author_facet Cuevas, Alejandro
Scurrell, Jennifer V.
Brown, Eva M.
Entenmann, Jason
Daepp, Madeleine I. G.
contents Chatbots have shown promise as tools to scale qualitative data collection. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) could accelerate this process by allowing researchers to easily deploy sophisticated interviewing chatbots. We test this assumption by conducting a large-scale user study (n=399) evaluating 3 different chatbots, two of which are LLM-based and a baseline which employs hard-coded questions. We evaluate the results with respect to participant engagement and experience, established metrics of chatbot quality grounded in theories of effective communication, and a novel scale evaluating "richness" or the extent to which responses capture the complexity and specificity of the social context under study. We find that, while the chatbots were able to elicit high-quality responses based on established evaluation metrics, the responses rarely capture participants' specific motives or personalized examples, and thus perform poorly with respect to richness. We further find low inter-rater reliability between LLMs and humans in the assessment of both quality and richness metrics. Our study offers a cautionary tale for scaling and evaluating qualitative research with LLMs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2309_10187
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Collecting Qualitative Data at Scale with Large Language Models: A Case Study
Cuevas, Alejandro
Scurrell, Jennifer V.
Brown, Eva M.
Entenmann, Jason
Daepp, Madeleine I. G.
Human-Computer Interaction
Chatbots have shown promise as tools to scale qualitative data collection. Recent advances in Large Language Models (LLMs) could accelerate this process by allowing researchers to easily deploy sophisticated interviewing chatbots. We test this assumption by conducting a large-scale user study (n=399) evaluating 3 different chatbots, two of which are LLM-based and a baseline which employs hard-coded questions. We evaluate the results with respect to participant engagement and experience, established metrics of chatbot quality grounded in theories of effective communication, and a novel scale evaluating "richness" or the extent to which responses capture the complexity and specificity of the social context under study. We find that, while the chatbots were able to elicit high-quality responses based on established evaluation metrics, the responses rarely capture participants' specific motives or personalized examples, and thus perform poorly with respect to richness. We further find low inter-rater reliability between LLMs and humans in the assessment of both quality and richness metrics. Our study offers a cautionary tale for scaling and evaluating qualitative research with LLMs.
title Collecting Qualitative Data at Scale with Large Language Models: A Case Study
topic Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2309.10187