Abdallah El Ali
Author directory2026
When Trust Meets Truth: Trust–Truth Separability in LLM-as-Judge
Xin Sun | Di Wu | Yuchen Guo | Jiahuan Pei | Isao Echizen | Abdallah El Ali | Saku Sugawara
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Xin Sun | Di Wu | Yuchen Guo | Jiahuan Pei | Isao Echizen | Abdallah El Ali | Saku Sugawara
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
LLM-as-Judge systems can produce multi-field evaluations, such as trustworthiness, reliability, and factuality. These outputs are often interpreted as independent evidence. We test this assumption for a common pair of judgments: trust scoring and binary truth classification. On correctness-controlled QA, LLM judges align trust scores with truth verdicts more tightly than human behavioral reference, suggesting weaker separations between trust and truth judgment. We then apply stress tests by changing only source cues of identical QA between Human and AI, while holding QA content fixed. Source attribution shifts not only trust scores but also truth verdicts and logit-derived correct-side probabilities. Results show that current LLM-as-Judge protocols should not treat trust scores as independent evidence for truth judgments without testing their separability under trust-relevant perturbations.
Label Effects: Shared Heuristic Reliance in Trust Assessment by Humans and LLM-as-a-Judge
Xin Sun | Di Wu | Sijing Qin | Isao Echizen | Abdallah El Ali | Saku Sugawara
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Xin Sun | Di Wu | Sijing Qin | Isao Echizen | Abdallah El Ali | Saku Sugawara
Proceedings of the 64th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used as automated evaluators (LLM-as-a-Judge). This work challenges its reliability by showing that trust judgments by LLMs are biased by disclosed source labels. Using a counterfactual design, we find that both humans and LLM judges assign higher trust to information labeled as human-authored than to the same content labeled as AI-generated. Eye-tracking data reveal that humans rely heavily on source labels as heuristic cues for judgments. We analyze LLM internal states during judgment. Across label conditions, models allocate denser attention to the label region than the content region, and this label dominance is stronger under Human labels than AI labels, consistent with the human gaze patterns. Besides, decision uncertainty measured by logits is higher under AI labels than Human labels. These results indicate that the source label is a salient heuristic cue for both humans and LLMs. It raises validity concerns for label-sensitive LLM-as-a-Judge evaluation, and we cautiously raise that aligning models with human preferences may propagate human heuristic reliance into models, motivating debiased evaluation and alignment.
2025
Rethinking the Alignment of Psychotherapy Dialogue Generation with Motivational Interviewing Strategies
Xin Sun | Xiao Tang | Abdallah El Ali | Zhuying Li | Pengjie Ren | Jan de Wit | Jiahuan Pei | Jos A.Bosch
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Xin Sun | Xiao Tang | Abdallah El Ali | Zhuying Li | Pengjie Ren | Jan de Wit | Jiahuan Pei | Jos A.Bosch
Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics
Recent advancements in large language models (LLMs) have shown promise in generating psychotherapeutic dialogues, particularly in the context of motivational interviewing (MI). However, the inherent lack of transparency in LLM outputs presents significant challenges given the sensitive nature of psychotherapy. Applying MI strategies, a set of MI skills, to generate more controllable therapeutic-adherent conversations with explainability provides a possible solution. In this work, we explore the alignment of LLMs with MI strategies by first prompting the LLMs to predict the appropriate strategies as reasoning and then utilizing these strategies to guide the subsequent dialogue generation. We seek to investigate whether such alignment leads to more controllable and explainable generations. Multiple experiments including automatic and human evaluations are conducted to validate the effectiveness of MI strategies in aligning psychotherapy dialogue generation. Our findings demonstrate the potential of LLMs in producing strategically aligned dialogues and suggest directions for practical applications in psychotherapeutic settings.