Can Unconfident LLM Annotations Be Used for Confident Conclusions?

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Gligorić, Kristina, Zrnic, Tijana, Lee, Cinoo, Candès, Emmanuel J., Jurafsky, Dan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2024
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author Gligorić, Kristina
Zrnic, Tijana
Lee, Cinoo
Candès, Emmanuel J.
Jurafsky, Dan
author_facet Gligorić, Kristina
Zrnic, Tijana
Lee, Cinoo
Candès, Emmanuel J.
Jurafsky, Dan
contents Large language models (LLMs) have shown high agreement with human raters across a variety of tasks, demonstrating potential to ease the challenges of human data collection. In computational social science (CSS), researchers are increasingly leveraging LLM annotations to complement slow and expensive human annotations. Still, guidelines for collecting and using LLM annotations, without compromising the validity of downstream conclusions, remain limited. We introduce Confidence-Driven Inference: a method that combines LLM annotations and LLM confidence indicators to strategically select which human annotations should be collected, with the goal of producing accurate statistical estimates and provably valid confidence intervals while reducing the number of human annotations needed. Our approach comes with safeguards against LLM annotations of poor quality, guaranteeing that the conclusions will be both valid and no less accurate than if we only relied on human annotations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Confidence-Driven Inference over baselines in statistical estimation tasks across three CSS settings--text politeness, stance, and bias--reducing the needed number of human annotations by over 25% in each. Although we use CSS settings for demonstration, Confidence-Driven Inference can be used to estimate most standard quantities across a broad range of NLP problems.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2408_15204
institution arXiv
publishDate 2024
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Can Unconfident LLM Annotations Be Used for Confident Conclusions?
Gligorić, Kristina
Zrnic, Tijana
Lee, Cinoo
Candès, Emmanuel J.
Jurafsky, Dan
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
Large language models (LLMs) have shown high agreement with human raters across a variety of tasks, demonstrating potential to ease the challenges of human data collection. In computational social science (CSS), researchers are increasingly leveraging LLM annotations to complement slow and expensive human annotations. Still, guidelines for collecting and using LLM annotations, without compromising the validity of downstream conclusions, remain limited. We introduce Confidence-Driven Inference: a method that combines LLM annotations and LLM confidence indicators to strategically select which human annotations should be collected, with the goal of producing accurate statistical estimates and provably valid confidence intervals while reducing the number of human annotations needed. Our approach comes with safeguards against LLM annotations of poor quality, guaranteeing that the conclusions will be both valid and no less accurate than if we only relied on human annotations. We demonstrate the effectiveness of Confidence-Driven Inference over baselines in statistical estimation tasks across three CSS settings--text politeness, stance, and bias--reducing the needed number of human annotations by over 25% in each. Although we use CSS settings for demonstration, Confidence-Driven Inference can be used to estimate most standard quantities across a broad range of NLP problems.
title Can Unconfident LLM Annotations Be Used for Confident Conclusions?
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Human-Computer Interaction
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2408.15204