From Values to Opinions: Predicting Human Behaviors and Stances Using Value-Injected Large Language Models

Dongjun Kang, Joonsuk Park, Yohan Jo, JinYeong Bak


Abstract
Being able to predict people’s opinions on issues and behaviors in realistic scenarios can be helpful in various domains, such as politics and marketing. However, conducting large-scale surveys like the European Social Survey to solicit people’s opinions on individual issues can incur prohibitive costs. Leveraging prior research showing influence of core human values on individual decisions and actions, we propose to use value-injected large language models (LLM) to predict opinions and behaviors. To this end, we present Value Injection Method (VIM), a collection of two methods—argument generation and question answering—designed to inject targeted value distributions into LLMs via fine-tuning. We then conduct a series of experiments on four tasks to test the effectiveness of VIM and the possibility of using value-injected LLMs to predict opinions and behaviors of people. We find that LLMs value-injected with variations of VIM substantially outperform the baselines. Also, the results suggest that opinions and behaviors can be better predicted using value-injected LLMs than the baseline approaches.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.961
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
15539–15559
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.961
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.961
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Dongjun Kang, Joonsuk Park, Yohan Jo, and JinYeong Bak. 2023. From Values to Opinions: Predicting Human Behaviors and Stances Using Value-Injected Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15539–15559, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
From Values to Opinions: Predicting Human Behaviors and Stances Using Value-Injected Large Language Models (Kang et al., EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.961.pdf
Video:
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