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Main Authors: Zhou, Yuxiang, Xu, Hainiu, Ong, Desmond C., Liakata, Maria, Slovak, Petr, He, Yulan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11381
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author Zhou, Yuxiang
Xu, Hainiu
Ong, Desmond C.
Liakata, Maria
Slovak, Petr
He, Yulan
author_facet Zhou, Yuxiang
Xu, Hainiu
Ong, Desmond C.
Liakata, Maria
Slovak, Petr
He, Yulan
contents As the utilization of language models in interdisciplinary, human-centered studies grow, expectations of their capabilities continue to evolve. Beyond excelling at conventional tasks, models are now expected to perform well on user-centric measurements involving confidence and human (dis)agreement-factors that reflect subjective preferences. While modeling subjectivity plays an essential role in cognitive science and has been extensively studied, its investigation at the intersection with NLP remains under-explored. In light of this gap, we explore how language models can quantify subjectivity in cognitive appraisal by conducting comprehensive experiments and analyses with both fine-tuned models and prompt-based large language models (LLMs). Our quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that personality traits and demographic information are critical for measuring subjectivity, yet existing post-hoc calibration methods often fail to achieve satisfactory performance. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis provides valuable insights to guide future research at the intersection of NLP and cognitive science.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_11381
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Modeling Subjectivity in Cognitive Appraisal with Language Models
Zhou, Yuxiang
Xu, Hainiu
Ong, Desmond C.
Liakata, Maria
Slovak, Petr
He, Yulan
Computation and Language
As the utilization of language models in interdisciplinary, human-centered studies grow, expectations of their capabilities continue to evolve. Beyond excelling at conventional tasks, models are now expected to perform well on user-centric measurements involving confidence and human (dis)agreement-factors that reflect subjective preferences. While modeling subjectivity plays an essential role in cognitive science and has been extensively studied, its investigation at the intersection with NLP remains under-explored. In light of this gap, we explore how language models can quantify subjectivity in cognitive appraisal by conducting comprehensive experiments and analyses with both fine-tuned models and prompt-based large language models (LLMs). Our quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that personality traits and demographic information are critical for measuring subjectivity, yet existing post-hoc calibration methods often fail to achieve satisfactory performance. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis provides valuable insights to guide future research at the intersection of NLP and cognitive science.
title Modeling Subjectivity in Cognitive Appraisal with Language Models
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.11381