Ask the experts: sourcing a high-quality nutrition counseling dataset through Human-AI collaboration

Simone Balloccu, Ehud Reiter, Karen Li, Rafael Sargsyan, Vivek Kumar, Diego Reforgiato, Daniele Riboni, Ondrej Dusek


Abstract
Large Language Models (LLMs) are being employed by end-users for various tasks, including sensitive ones such as health counseling, disregarding potential safety concerns. It is thus necessary to understand how adequately LLMs perform in such domains. We conduct a case study on ChatGPT in nutrition counseling, a popular use-case where the model supports a user with their dietary struggles. We crowd-source real-world diet-related struggles, then work with nutrition experts to generate supportive text using ChatGPT. Finally, experts evaluate the safety and text quality of ChatGPT’s output. The result is the HAI-coaching dataset, containing ~2.4K crowdsourced dietary struggles and ~97K corresponding ChatGPT-generated and expert-annotated supportive texts. We analyse ChatGPT’s performance, discovering potentially harmful behaviours, especially for sensitive topics like mental health. Finally, we use HAI-coaching to test open LLMs on various downstream tasks, showing that even the latest models struggle to achieve good performance. HAI-coaching is available at https://github.com/uccollab/hai-coaching/
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.674
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
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Pages:
11519–11545
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URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.674
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Simone Balloccu, Ehud Reiter, Karen Li, Rafael Sargsyan, Vivek Kumar, Diego Reforgiato, Daniele Riboni, and Ondrej Dusek. 2024. Ask the experts: sourcing a high-quality nutrition counseling dataset through Human-AI collaboration. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 11519–11545, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Ask the experts: sourcing a high-quality nutrition counseling dataset through Human-AI collaboration (Balloccu et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.674.pdf