Tailoring Vaccine Messaging with Common-Ground Opinions

Rickard Stureborg, Sanxing Chen, Roy Xie, Aayushi Patel, Christopher Li, Chloe Zhu, Tingnan Hu, Jun Yang, Bhuwan Dhingra


Abstract
One way to personalize chatbot interactions is by establishing common ground with the intended reader. A domain where establishing mutual understanding could be particularly impactful is vaccine concerns and misinformation. Vaccine interventions are forms of messaging which aim to answer concerns expressed about vaccination. Tailoring responses in this domain is difficult, since opinions often have seemingly little ideological overlap. We define the task of tailoring vaccine interventions to a Common-Ground Opinion (CGO). Tailoring responses to a CGO involves meaningfully improving the answer by relating it to an opinion or belief the reader holds. In this paper we introduce Tailor-CGO, a dataset for evaluating how well responses are tailored to provided CGOs. We benchmark several major LLMs on this task; finding GPT-4-Turbo performs significantly better than others. We also build automatic evaluation metrics, including an efficient and accurate BERT model that outperforms finetuned LLMs, investigate how to successfully tailor vaccine messaging to CGOs, and provide actionable recommendations from this investigation.Tailor-CGO dataset and code available at: https://github.com/rickardstureborg/tailor-cgo
Anthology ID:
2024.findings-naacl.164
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024
Month:
June
Year:
2024
Address:
Mexico City, Mexico
Editors:
Kevin Duh, Helena Gomez, Steven Bethard
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2553–2575
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.164
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2024.findings-naacl.164
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Rickard Stureborg, Sanxing Chen, Roy Xie, Aayushi Patel, Christopher Li, Chloe Zhu, Tingnan Hu, Jun Yang, and Bhuwan Dhingra. 2024. Tailoring Vaccine Messaging with Common-Ground Opinions. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: NAACL 2024, pages 2553–2575, Mexico City, Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Tailoring Vaccine Messaging with Common-Ground Opinions (Stureborg et al., Findings 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.findings-naacl.164.pdf