Do *they* mean ‘us’? Interpreting Referring Expression variation under Intergroup Bias

Venkata Govindarajan, Matianyu Zang, Kyle Mahowald, David Beaver, Junyi Jessy Li


Abstract
The variations between in-group and out-group speech (intergroup bias) are subtle and could underlie many social phenomena like stereotype perpetuation and implicit bias. In this paper, we model intergroup bias as a tagging task on English sports comments from forums dedicated to fandom for NFL teams. We curate a dataset of over 6 million game-time comments from opposing perspectives (the teams in the game), each comment grounded in a non-linguistic description of the events that precipitated these comments (live win probabilities for each team). Expert and crowd annotations justify modeling the bias through tagging of implicit and explicit referring expressions and reveal the rich, contextual understanding of language and the world required for this task. For large-scale analysis of intergroup variation, we use LLMs for automated tagging, and discover that LLMs occasionally perform better when prompted with linguistic descriptions of the win probability at the time of the comment, rather than numerical probability. Further, large-scale tagging of comments using LLMs uncovers linear variations in the form of referent across win probabilities that distinguish in-group and out-group utterances.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.571
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
9772–9785
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.571
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Venkata Govindarajan, Matianyu Zang, Kyle Mahowald, David Beaver, and Junyi Jessy Li. 2024. Do *they* mean ‘us’? Interpreting Referring Expression variation under Intergroup Bias. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 9772–9785, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Do they mean ‘us’? Interpreting Referring Expression variation under Intergroup Bias (Govindarajan et al., Findings 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.571.pdf
Software:
 2024.findings-emnlp.571.software.zip
Data:
 2024.findings-emnlp.571.data.zip