Implicit Personalization in Language Models: A Systematic Study

Zhijing Jin, Nils Heil, Jiarui Liu, Shehzaad Dhuliawala, Yahang Qi, Bernhard Schölkopf, Rada Mihalcea, Mrinmaya Sachan


Abstract
Implicit Personalization (IP) is a phenomenon of language models inferring a user’s background from the implicit cues in the input prompts and tailoring the response based on this inference. While previous work has touched upon various instances of this problem, there lacks a unified framework to study this behavior. This work systematically studies IP through a rigorous mathematical formulation, a multi-perspective moral reasoning framework, and a set of case studies. Our theoretical foundation for IP relies on a structural causal model and introduces a novel method, indirect intervention, to estimate the causal effect of a mediator variable that cannot be directly intervened upon. Beyond the technical approach, we also introduce a set of moral reasoning principles based on three schools of moral philosophy to study when IP may or may not be ethically appropriate. Equipped with both mathematical and ethical insights, we present three diverse case studies illustrating the varied nature of the IP problem and offer recommendations for future research.
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-emnlp.717
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:
12309–12325
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-emnlp.717
DOI:
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Cite (ACL):
Zhijing Jin, Nils Heil, Jiarui Liu, Shehzaad Dhuliawala, Yahang Qi, Bernhard Schölkopf, Rada Mihalcea, and Mrinmaya Sachan. 2024. Implicit Personalization in Language Models: A Systematic Study. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024, pages 12309–12325, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Implicit Personalization in Language Models: A Systematic Study (Jin et al., Findings 2024)
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