Humans Hallucinate Too: Language Models Identify and Correct Subjective Annotation Errors With Label-in-a-Haystack Prompts

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Main Authors: Chochlakis, Georgios, Wu, Peter, Bedi, Arjun, Ma, Marcus, Lerman, Kristina, Narayanan, Shrikanth
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Chochlakis, Georgios
Wu, Peter
Bedi, Arjun
Ma, Marcus
Lerman, Kristina
Narayanan, Shrikanth
author_facet Chochlakis, Georgios
Wu, Peter
Bedi, Arjun
Ma, Marcus
Lerman, Kristina
Narayanan, Shrikanth
contents Modeling complex subjective tasks in Natural Language Processing, such as recognizing emotion and morality, is considerably challenging due to significant variation in human annotations. This variation often reflects reasonable differences in semantic interpretations rather than mere noise, necessitating methods to distinguish between legitimate subjectivity and error. We address this challenge by exploring label verification in these contexts using Large Language Models (LLMs). First, we propose a simple In-Context Learning binary filtering baseline that estimates the reasonableness of a document-label pair. We then introduce the Label-in-a-Haystack setting: the query and its label(s) are included in the demonstrations shown to LLMs, which are prompted to predict the label(s) again, while receiving task-specific instructions (e.g., emotion recognition) rather than label copying. We show how the failure to copy the label(s) to the output of the LLM are task-relevant and informative. Building on this, we propose the Label-in-a-Haystack Rectification (LiaHR) framework for subjective label correction: when the model outputs diverge from the reference gold labels, we assign the generated labels to the example instead of discarding it. This approach can be integrated into annotation pipelines to enhance signal-to-noise ratios. Comprehensive analyses, human evaluations, and ecological validity studies verify the utility of LiaHR for label correction. Code is available at https://github.com/gchochla/liahr.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_17222
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Humans Hallucinate Too: Language Models Identify and Correct Subjective Annotation Errors With Label-in-a-Haystack Prompts
Chochlakis, Georgios
Wu, Peter
Bedi, Arjun
Ma, Marcus
Lerman, Kristina
Narayanan, Shrikanth
Computation and Language
Modeling complex subjective tasks in Natural Language Processing, such as recognizing emotion and morality, is considerably challenging due to significant variation in human annotations. This variation often reflects reasonable differences in semantic interpretations rather than mere noise, necessitating methods to distinguish between legitimate subjectivity and error. We address this challenge by exploring label verification in these contexts using Large Language Models (LLMs). First, we propose a simple In-Context Learning binary filtering baseline that estimates the reasonableness of a document-label pair. We then introduce the Label-in-a-Haystack setting: the query and its label(s) are included in the demonstrations shown to LLMs, which are prompted to predict the label(s) again, while receiving task-specific instructions (e.g., emotion recognition) rather than label copying. We show how the failure to copy the label(s) to the output of the LLM are task-relevant and informative. Building on this, we propose the Label-in-a-Haystack Rectification (LiaHR) framework for subjective label correction: when the model outputs diverge from the reference gold labels, we assign the generated labels to the example instead of discarding it. This approach can be integrated into annotation pipelines to enhance signal-to-noise ratios. Comprehensive analyses, human evaluations, and ecological validity studies verify the utility of LiaHR for label correction. Code is available at https://github.com/gchochla/liahr.
title Humans Hallucinate Too: Language Models Identify and Correct Subjective Annotation Errors With Label-in-a-Haystack Prompts
topic Computation and Language
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.17222