Covert Bias: The Severity of Social Views’ Unalignment in Language Models Towards Implicit and Explicit Opinion

Abeer Aldayel, Areej Alokaili, Rehab Alahmadi


Abstract
While various approaches have recently been studied for bias identification, little is known about how implicit language that does not explicitly convey a viewpoint affects bias amplification in large language models. To examine the severity of bias toward a view, we evaluated the performance of two downstream tasks where the implicit and explicit knowledge of social groups were used. First, we present a stress test evaluation by using a biased model in edge cases of excessive bias scenarios. Then, we evaluate how LLMs calibrate linguistically in response to both implicit and explicit opinions when they are aligned with conflicting viewpoints. Our findings reveal a discrepancy in LLM performance in identifying implicit and explicit opinions, with a general tendency of bias toward explicit opinions of opposing stances. Moreover, the bias-aligned models generate more cautious responses using uncertainty phrases compared to the unaligned (zero-shot) base models. The direct, incautious responses of the unaligned models suggest a need for further refinement of decisiveness by incorporating uncertainty markers to enhance their reliability, especially on socially nuanced topics with high subjectivity.
Anthology ID:
2024.nlp4pi-1.6
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:
68–77
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.6
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abeer Aldayel, Areej Alokaili, and Rehab Alahmadi. 2024. Covert Bias: The Severity of Social Views’ Unalignment in Language Models Towards Implicit and Explicit Opinion. In Proceedings of the Third Workshop on NLP for Positive Impact, pages 68–77, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Covert Bias: The Severity of Social Views’ Unalignment in Language Models Towards Implicit and Explicit Opinion (Aldayel et al., NLP4PI 2024)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.nlp4pi-1.6.pdf