Evaluating how LLM annotations represent diverse views on contentious topics

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Brown, Megan A., Atreja, Shubham, Hemphill, Libby, Wu, Patrick Y.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Brown, Megan A.
Atreja, Shubham
Hemphill, Libby
Wu, Patrick Y.
author_facet Brown, Megan A.
Atreja, Shubham
Hemphill, Libby
Wu, Patrick Y.
contents Researchers have proposed the use of generative large language models (LLMs) to label data for research and applied settings. This literature emphasizes the improved performance of these models relative to other natural language models, noting that generative LLMs typically outperform other models and even humans across several metrics. Previous literature has examined bias across many applications and contexts, but less work has focused specifically on bias in generative LLMs' responses to subjective annotation tasks. This bias could result in labels applied by LLMs that disproportionately align with majority groups over a more diverse set of viewpoints. In this paper, we evaluate how LLMs represent diverse viewpoints on these contentious tasks. Across four annotation tasks on four datasets, we show that LLMs do not show systematic substantial disagreement with annotators on the basis of demographics. Rather, we find that multiple LLMs tend to be biased in the same directions on the same demographic categories within the same datasets. Moreover, the disagreement between human annotators on the labeling task -- a measure of item difficulty -- is far more predictive of LLM agreement with human annotators. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for researchers and practitioners using LLMs for automated data annotation tasks. Specifically, we emphasize that fairness evaluations must be contextual, model choice alone will not solve potential issues of bias, and item difficulty must be integrated into bias assessments.
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id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_23243
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Evaluating how LLM annotations represent diverse views on contentious topics
Brown, Megan A.
Atreja, Shubham
Hemphill, Libby
Wu, Patrick Y.
Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
Researchers have proposed the use of generative large language models (LLMs) to label data for research and applied settings. This literature emphasizes the improved performance of these models relative to other natural language models, noting that generative LLMs typically outperform other models and even humans across several metrics. Previous literature has examined bias across many applications and contexts, but less work has focused specifically on bias in generative LLMs' responses to subjective annotation tasks. This bias could result in labels applied by LLMs that disproportionately align with majority groups over a more diverse set of viewpoints. In this paper, we evaluate how LLMs represent diverse viewpoints on these contentious tasks. Across four annotation tasks on four datasets, we show that LLMs do not show systematic substantial disagreement with annotators on the basis of demographics. Rather, we find that multiple LLMs tend to be biased in the same directions on the same demographic categories within the same datasets. Moreover, the disagreement between human annotators on the labeling task -- a measure of item difficulty -- is far more predictive of LLM agreement with human annotators. We conclude with a discussion of the implications for researchers and practitioners using LLMs for automated data annotation tasks. Specifically, we emphasize that fairness evaluations must be contextual, model choice alone will not solve potential issues of bias, and item difficulty must be integrated into bias assessments.
title Evaluating how LLM annotations represent diverse views on contentious topics
topic Computation and Language
Artificial Intelligence
Computers and Society
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.23243