You don't need a personality test to know these models are unreliable: Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models on Psychometric Instruments

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Shu, Bangzhao, Zhang, Lechen, Choi, Minje, Dunagan, Lavinia, Logeswaran, Lajanugen, Lee, Moontae, Card, Dallas, Jurgens, David
Format: Preprint
Published: 2023
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author Shu, Bangzhao
Zhang, Lechen
Choi, Minje
Dunagan, Lavinia
Logeswaran, Lajanugen
Lee, Moontae
Card, Dallas
Jurgens, David
author_facet Shu, Bangzhao
Zhang, Lechen
Choi, Minje
Dunagan, Lavinia
Logeswaran, Lajanugen
Lee, Moontae
Card, Dallas
Jurgens, David
contents The versatility of Large Language Models (LLMs) on natural language understanding tasks has made them popular for research in social sciences. To properly understand the properties and innate personas of LLMs, researchers have performed studies that involve using prompts in the form of questions that ask LLMs about particular opinions. In this study, we take a cautionary step back and examine whether the current format of prompting LLMs elicits responses in a consistent and robust manner. We first construct a dataset that contains 693 questions encompassing 39 different instruments of persona measurement on 115 persona axes. Additionally, we design a set of prompts containing minor variations and examine LLMs' capabilities to generate answers, as well as prompt variations to examine their consistency with respect to content-level variations such as switching the order of response options or negating the statement. Our experiments on 17 different LLMs reveal that even simple perturbations significantly downgrade a model's question-answering ability, and that most LLMs have low negation consistency. Our results suggest that the currently widespread practice of prompting is insufficient to accurately and reliably capture model perceptions, and we therefore discuss potential alternatives to improve these issues.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2311_09718
institution arXiv
publishDate 2023
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle You don't need a personality test to know these models are unreliable: Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models on Psychometric Instruments
Shu, Bangzhao
Zhang, Lechen
Choi, Minje
Dunagan, Lavinia
Logeswaran, Lajanugen
Lee, Moontae
Card, Dallas
Jurgens, David
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
The versatility of Large Language Models (LLMs) on natural language understanding tasks has made them popular for research in social sciences. To properly understand the properties and innate personas of LLMs, researchers have performed studies that involve using prompts in the form of questions that ask LLMs about particular opinions. In this study, we take a cautionary step back and examine whether the current format of prompting LLMs elicits responses in a consistent and robust manner. We first construct a dataset that contains 693 questions encompassing 39 different instruments of persona measurement on 115 persona axes. Additionally, we design a set of prompts containing minor variations and examine LLMs' capabilities to generate answers, as well as prompt variations to examine their consistency with respect to content-level variations such as switching the order of response options or negating the statement. Our experiments on 17 different LLMs reveal that even simple perturbations significantly downgrade a model's question-answering ability, and that most LLMs have low negation consistency. Our results suggest that the currently widespread practice of prompting is insufficient to accurately and reliably capture model perceptions, and we therefore discuss potential alternatives to improve these issues.
title You don't need a personality test to know these models are unreliable: Assessing the Reliability of Large Language Models on Psychometric Instruments
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2311.09718