Risks and NLP Design: A Case Study on Procedural Document QA

Fuente: arXiv
Salvato in:
Dettagli Bibliografici
Autori principali: Haduong, Nikita, Gao, Alice, Smith, Noah A.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2024
Soggetti:
Accesso online:
Tags: Aggiungi Tag
Nessun Tag, puoi essere il primo ad aggiungerne!!
_version_ 1866913476520181760
author Haduong, Nikita
Gao, Alice
Smith, Noah A.
author_facet Haduong, Nikita
Gao, Alice
Smith, Noah A.
contents As NLP systems are increasingly deployed at scale, concerns about their potential negative impacts have attracted the attention of the research community, yet discussions of risk have mostly been at an abstract level and focused on generic AI or NLP applications. We argue that clearer assessments of risks and harms to users--and concrete strategies to mitigate them--will be possible when we specialize the analysis to more concrete applications and their plausible users. As an illustration, this paper is grounded in cooking recipe procedural document question answering (ProcDocQA), where there are well-defined risks to users such as injuries or allergic reactions. Our case study shows that an existing language model, applied in "zero-shot" mode, quantitatively answers real-world questions about recipes as well or better than the humans who have answered the questions on the web. Using a novel questionnaire informed by theoretical work on AI risk, we conduct a risk-oriented error analysis that could then inform the design of a future system to be deployed with lower risk of harm and better performance.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_11860
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Risks and NLP Design: A Case Study on Procedural Document QA
Haduong, Nikita
Gao, Alice
Smith, Noah A.
Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
As NLP systems are increasingly deployed at scale, concerns about their potential negative impacts have attracted the attention of the research community, yet discussions of risk have mostly been at an abstract level and focused on generic AI or NLP applications. We argue that clearer assessments of risks and harms to users--and concrete strategies to mitigate them--will be possible when we specialize the analysis to more concrete applications and their plausible users. As an illustration, this paper is grounded in cooking recipe procedural document question answering (ProcDocQA), where there are well-defined risks to users such as injuries or allergic reactions. Our case study shows that an existing language model, applied in "zero-shot" mode, quantitatively answers real-world questions about recipes as well or better than the humans who have answered the questions on the web. Using a novel questionnaire informed by theoretical work on AI risk, we conduct a risk-oriented error analysis that could then inform the design of a future system to be deployed with lower risk of harm and better performance.
title Risks and NLP Design: A Case Study on Procedural Document QA
topic Computation and Language
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.11860