Human disagreement is ubiquitous and well-known in labeling. However, variation in explanations, captured through token-level human rationales, remains far less explored. At the same time, it is unclear how to best evaluate human labels and rationales, or how to best aggregate rationales beyond majority vote, in light of this variation. Yet rationales can reveal the richness of human reasoning, which may differ in style, values, and interpretations, especially in subjective NLP tasks such as hate-speech detection. In this work, we unify diverse models, training strategies, loss functions, and existing evaluation metrics under a single protocol by systematically re-implementing them across different label and rationale representation spaces. Classification metrics are organized around two key properties—predictive and distributional—while explainability metrics through three complementary dimensions: plausibility, faithfulness, and complexity. In this unified evaluation framework, we assess model behavior across classification and explainability metrics, as well as metric sensitivity to the choice of label (hard and soft) and rationale representation space (hard, intermediate and soft). Results show that intermediate and soft representations better capture variation in labels and rationales, with metrics revealing complementary facets of the same property. These findings highlight the need to align evaluation with task goals and rethink subjective NLP evaluation to better reflect diverse human judgments.

Modern language models excel at factual reasoning but struggle with value diversity: the multiplicity of plausible human perspectives. Tasks such as hate speech or sexism detection expose this limitation, where human disagreement captures the diversity of perspectives that models need to account for, rather than dataset noise. In this paper, we explore whether multi-perspective in-context learning (ICL) can align large language models (LLMs) with this diversity without parameter updates. We evaluate four LLMs on five datasets across three languages (English, Arabic, Italian), considering three label-space representations (aggregated hard, disaggregated hard, and disaggregated soft) and five demonstration selection and ordering strategies. Our multi-perspective approach outperforms standard prompting on aggregated English labels, while disaggregated soft predictions better align with human judgments in Arabic and Italian datasets.These findings highlight the importance of perspective-aware LLMs for reducing bias and polarization, while also revealing the challenges of applying ICL to socially sensitive tasks. We further probe the model faithfulness using eXplainable AI (XAI), offering insights into how LLMs handle human disagreement.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate natural language explanations that rationalize their own decisions, a phenomenon commonly referred to as self-explanations. Such explanations have emerged as a promising direction for explainable artificial intelligence (XAI), particularly for interpreting LLM behavior. However, while self-explanations often appear plausible, whether they faithfully reflect a model’s underlying reasoning process remains an open question. In this opinion paper, we argue that self-explanations can be highly plausible, questionably faithful, and yet highly actionable. From a traditional XAI perspective, we identify the limitations of standard evaluation protocols for LLM-generated self-explanations and propose practical guidelines for assessing their plausibility and faithfulness. Moreover, we argue that evaluation should extend beyond these criteria to actionability, highlighting applications of LLM rationalization capabilities that support informed decision-making and appropriate action across diverse stakeholders.

In the field of Natural Language Processing (NLP), a common approach for resolving human disagreement involves establishing a consensus among multiple annotators. However, previous research shows that overlooking individual opinions can result in the marginalization of minority perspectives, particularly in subjective tasks, where annotators may systematically disagree due to their personal preferences. Emerging Multi-Perspective approaches challenge traditional methodologies that treat disagreement as mere noise, instead recognizing it as a valuable source of knowledge shaped by annotators’ diverse backgrounds, life experiences, and values.This thesis proposal aims to (1) identify the challenges of designing disaggregated datasets i.e., preserving individual labels in human-annotated datasets for subjective tasks (2) propose solutions for developing Perspective-Aware by design systems and (3) explore the correlation between human disagreement and model uncertainty leveraging eXplainable AI techniques (XAI).Our long-term goal is to create a framework adaptable to various subjective NLP tasks to promote the development of more responsible and inclusive models.

The varied backgrounds and experiences of human annotators inject different opinions and potential biases into the data, inevitably leading to disagreements. Yet, traditional aggregation methods fail to capture individual judgments since they rely on the notion of a single ground truth. Our aim is to review prior contributions to pinpoint the shortcomings that might cause stereotypical content generation. As a preliminary study, our purpose is to investigate state-of-the-art approaches, primarily focusing on the following two research directions. First, we investigate how adding subjectivity aspects to LLMs might guarantee diversity. We then look into the alignment between humans and LLMs and discuss how to measure it. Considering existing gaps, our review explores possible methods to mitigate the perpetuation of biases targeting specific communities. However, we recognize the potential risk of disseminating sensitive information due to the utilization of socio-demographic data in the training process. These considerations underscore the inclusion of diverse perspectives while taking into account the critical importance of implementing robust safeguards to protect individuals’ privacy and prevent the inadvertent propagation of sensitive information.

How newspapers cover news significantly impacts how facts are understood, perceived, and processed by the public. This is especially crucial when serious crimes are reported, e.g., in the case of femicides, where the description of the perpetrator and the victim builds a strong, often polarized opinion of this severe societal issue. This paper presents FMNews, a new dataset of articles reporting femicides extracted from Italian newspapers. Our core contribution aims to promote the development of a deeper framing and awareness of the phenomenon through an original resource available and accessible to the research community, facilitating further analyses on the topic. The paper also provides a preliminary study of the resulting collection through several example use cases and scenarios.

Different ways of linguistically expressing the same real-world event can lead to different perceptions of what happened. Previous work has shown that different descriptions of gender-based violence (GBV) influence the reader’s perception of who is to blame for the violence, possibly reinforcing stereotypes which see the victim as partly responsible, too. As a contribution to raise awareness on perspective-based writing, and to facilitate access to alternative perspectives, we introduce the novel task of automatically rewriting GBV descriptions as a means to alter the perceived level of blame on the perpetrator. We present a quasi-parallel dataset of sentences with low and high perceived responsibility levels for the perpetrator, and experiment with unsupervised (mBART-based), zero-shot and few-shot (GPT3-based) methods for rewriting sentences. We evaluate our models using a questionnaire study and a suite of automatic metrics.