Limits to Predicting Online Speech Using Large Language Models

Fuente: arXiv
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Autores principales: Remeli, Mina, Hardt, Moritz, Williamson, Robert C.
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2024
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author Remeli, Mina
Hardt, Moritz
Williamson, Robert C.
author_facet Remeli, Mina
Hardt, Moritz
Williamson, Robert C.
contents Our paper studies the predictability of online speech -- that is, how well language models learn to model the distribution of user generated content on X (previously Twitter). We define predictability as a measure of the model's uncertainty, i.e. its negative log-likelihood. As the basis of our study, we collect 10M tweets for ``tweet-tuning'' base models and a further 6.25M posts from more than five thousand X (previously Twitter) users and their peers. In our study involving more than 5000 subjects, we find that predicting posts of individual users remains surprisingly hard. Moreover, it matters greatly what context is used: models using the users' own history significantly outperform models using posts from their social circle. We validate these results across four large language models ranging in size from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters. Moreover, our results replicate if instead of prompting the model with additional context, we finetune on it. We follow up with a detailed investigation on what is learned in-context and a demographic analysis. Up to 20\% of what is learned in-context is the use of @-mentions and hashtags. Our main results hold across the demographic groups we studied.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2407_12850
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Limits to Predicting Online Speech Using Large Language Models
Remeli, Mina
Hardt, Moritz
Williamson, Robert C.
Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
Our paper studies the predictability of online speech -- that is, how well language models learn to model the distribution of user generated content on X (previously Twitter). We define predictability as a measure of the model's uncertainty, i.e. its negative log-likelihood. As the basis of our study, we collect 10M tweets for ``tweet-tuning'' base models and a further 6.25M posts from more than five thousand X (previously Twitter) users and their peers. In our study involving more than 5000 subjects, we find that predicting posts of individual users remains surprisingly hard. Moreover, it matters greatly what context is used: models using the users' own history significantly outperform models using posts from their social circle. We validate these results across four large language models ranging in size from 1.5 billion to 70 billion parameters. Moreover, our results replicate if instead of prompting the model with additional context, we finetune on it. We follow up with a detailed investigation on what is learned in-context and a demographic analysis. Up to 20\% of what is learned in-context is the use of @-mentions and hashtags. Our main results hold across the demographic groups we studied.
title Limits to Predicting Online Speech Using Large Language Models
topic Computation and Language
Computers and Society
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2407.12850