Cultural Conditioning or Placebo? On the Effectiveness of Socio-Demographic Prompting

Sagnik Mukherjee, Muhammad Adilazuarda, Sunayana Sitaram, Kalika Bali, Alham Aji, Monojit Choudhury


Abstract
Socio-demographic prompting is a commonly employed approach to study cultural biases in LLMs as well as for aligning models to certain cultures. In this paper, we systematically probe four LLMs (Llama 3, Mistral v0.2, GPT-3.5 Turbo and GPT4) with prompts that are conditioned on culturally sensitive and non-sensitive cues, on datasets that are supposed to be culturally sensitive (EtiCor and CALI) or neutral (MMLU and ETHICS). We observe that all models except GPT4 show significant variations in their responses on both kinds of datasets for both kinds of prompts, casting doubt on the robustness of the culturally-conditioned prompting as a method for eliciting cultural bias in models that are not sufficiently stable with respect to arbitrary prompting cues. Further, we also show that some of the supposedly culturally neutral datasets have a non-trivial fraction of culturally sensitive questions/tasks.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.884
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
15811–15837
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.884
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Sagnik Mukherjee, Muhammad Adilazuarda, Sunayana Sitaram, Kalika Bali, Alham Aji, and Monojit Choudhury. 2024. Cultural Conditioning or Placebo? On the Effectiveness of Socio-Demographic Prompting. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 15811–15837, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Cultural Conditioning or Placebo? On the Effectiveness of Socio-Demographic Prompting (Mukherjee et al., EMNLP 2024)
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https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.884.pdf