Investigating Ableism in LLMs through Multi-turn Conversation

Guojun Wu, Sarah Ebling


Abstract
To reveal ableism (i.e., bias against persons with disabilities) in large language models (LLMs), we introduce a novel approach involving multi-turn conversations, enabling a comparative assessment. Initially, we prompt the LLM to elaborate short biographies, followed by a request to incorporate information about a disability. Finally, we employ several methods to identify the top words that distinguish the disability-integrated biographies from those without. This comparative setting helps us uncover how LLMs handle disability-related information and reveal underlying biases. We observe that LLMs tend to highlight disabilities in a manner that can be perceived as patronizing or as implying that overcoming challenges is unexpected due to the disability.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlp4pi-1.18
Volume:
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Daryna Dementieva, Oana Ignat, Zhijing Jin, Rada Mihalcea, Giorgio Piatti, Joel Tetreault, Steven Wilson, Jieyu Zhao
Venue:
NLP4PI
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
202–210
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.18
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Guojun Wu and Sarah Ebling. 2024. Investigating Ableism in LLMs through Multi-turn Conversation. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, pages 202–210, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Investigating Ableism in LLMs through Multi-turn Conversation (Wu & Ebling, NLP4PI 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.18.pdf