Dale Schuurmans
Author directory2026
Judging with Confidence: Calibrating Autoraters to Preference Distributions
Zhuohang Li | Xiaowei Li | Chengyu Huang | Guowang Li | Katayoon Goshvadi | Bo Dai | Dale Schuurmans | Xin Zhou | Hamid Palangi | Yiwen Song | Palash Goyal | Murat Kantarcioglu | Bradley A. Malin | Yuan Xue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
Zhuohang Li | Xiaowei Li | Chengyu Huang | Guowang Li | Katayoon Goshvadi | Bo Dai | Dale Schuurmans | Xin Zhou | Hamid Palangi | Yiwen Song | Palash Goyal | Murat Kantarcioglu | Bradley A. Malin | Yuan Xue
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2026
The alignment of large language models (LLMs) with human values increasingly relies on using other LLMs as automated judges, or "autoraters". However, their reliability is limited by a foundational issue: they are trained on discrete preference labels, forcing a single ground truth onto tasks that are often subjective, ambiguous, or nuanced. We argue that a reliable autorater must learn to model the full distribution of preferences defined by a target population. In this paper, we propose a general framework for calibrating probabilistic autoraters to any given preference distribution. We formalize the problem and present two learning methods tailored to different data conditions: 1) a direct supervised fine-tuning for dense, probabilistic labels, and 2) a reinforcement learning approach for sparse, binary labels. Our empirical results show that finetuning autoraters with a distribution-matching objective leads to verbalized probability predictions that are better aligned with the target preference distribution, with improved calibration and significantly lower positional bias, all while preserving performance on objective tasks.
2010
Improved Natural Language Learning via Variance-Regularization Support Vector Machines
Shane Bergsma | Dekang Lin | Dale Schuurmans
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
Shane Bergsma | Dekang Lin | Dale Schuurmans
Proceedings of the Fourteenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning
2008
Semi-Supervised Convex Training for Dependency Parsing
Qin Iris Wang | Dale Schuurmans | Dekang Lin
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT
Qin Iris Wang | Dale Schuurmans | Dekang Lin
Proceedings of ACL-08: HLT
2006
Improved Large Margin Dependency Parsing via Local Constraints and Laplacian Regularization
Qin Iris Wang | Colin Cherry | Dan Lizotte | Dale Schuurmans
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-X)
Qin Iris Wang | Colin Cherry | Dan Lizotte | Dale Schuurmans
Proceedings of the Tenth Conference on Computational Natural Language Learning (CoNLL-X)
Semi-Supervised Conditional Random Fields for Improved Sequence Segmentation and Labeling
Feng Jiao | Shaojun Wang | Chi-Hoon Lee | Russell Greiner | Dale Schuurmans
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Feng Jiao | Shaojun Wang | Chi-Hoon Lee | Russell Greiner | Dale Schuurmans
Proceedings of the 21st International Conference on Computational Linguistics and 44th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
2005
Strictly Lexical Dependency Parsing
Qin Iris Wang | Dale Schuurmans | Dekang Lin
Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Parsing Technology
Qin Iris Wang | Dale Schuurmans | Dekang Lin
Proceedings of the Ninth International Workshop on Parsing Technology
2003
Text Classification in Asian Languages without Word Segmentation
Fuchun Peng | Xiangji Huang | Dale Schuurmans | Shaojun Wang
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages
Fuchun Peng | Xiangji Huang | Dale Schuurmans | Shaojun Wang
Proceedings of the Sixth International Workshop on Information Retrieval with Asian Languages
Language and Task Independent Text Categorization with Simple Language Models
Fuchun Peng | Dale Schuurmans | Shaojun Wang
Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Fuchun Peng | Dale Schuurmans | Shaojun Wang
Proceedings of the 2003 Human Language Technology Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Language Independent Authorship Attribution with Character Level N-Grams
Fuchun Peng | Dale Schuurmans | Vlado Keselj | Shaojun Wang
10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Fuchun Peng | Dale Schuurmans | Vlado Keselj | Shaojun Wang
10th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics