Attribute-Based Diagnosis of LLM Alignment with Hate Speech Annotations

Mohamed Amine Jradi, Faeze Ghorbanpour, Alexander Fraser


Abstract
Hate speech annotation is costly, subjective, and prone to annotator disagreement, making large-scale dataset construction challenging. We systematically analyze how well large language models (LLMs) align with human judgments across ten theoretically grounded subjective attributes, such as dehumanization, violence, and sentiment, evaluating both small and large variants of Llama 3.1 and Qwen 2.5. Our analysis reveals a consistent split across all models: behaviorally explicit dimensions (insult, humiliate, attack-defend) correlate strongly with human annotations, while evaluative dimensions (respect, sentiment, hate speech) are systematically inverted. Demographic persona conditioning reduces model confidence without improving alignment. Building on these insights, we propose combining attribute-level LLM predictions via a confidence-weighted Ridge regression to reconstruct continuous hate speech scores from the Measuring Hate Speech corpus, achieving R2 of up to 0.71 and outperforming direct prompting baselines, demonstrating that structured attribute decomposition recovers a richer and more human-aligned signal than end-to-end label prediction alone.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-emnlp.1186
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Month:
October
Year:
2026
Address:
Budapest, Hungary
Editors:
Hung-Yi Lee, Sunipa Dev, Jessy Li, Desmond Elliott
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
SIGDAT
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
25065–25075
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1186/
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Mohamed Amine Jradi, Faeze Ghorbanpour, and Alexander Fraser. 2026. Attribute-Based Diagnosis of LLM Alignment with Hate Speech Annotations. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026, pages 25065–25075, Budapest, Hungary. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Attribute-Based Diagnosis of LLM Alignment with Hate Speech Annotations (Jradi et al., Findings 2026)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2026.findings-emnlp.1186.pdf