The pervasive spread of misinformation and disinformation in social media underscores the critical importance of detecting media bias. While robust Large Language Models (LLMs) have emerged as foundational tools for bias prediction, concerns about inherent biases within these models persist. In this work, we investigate the presence and nature of bias within LLMs and its consequential impact on media bias detection. Departing from conventional approaches that focus solely on bias detection in media content, we delve into biases within the LLM systems themselves. Through meticulous examination, we probe whether LLMs exhibit biases, particularly in political bias prediction and text continuation tasks. Additionally, we explore bias across diverse topics, aiming to uncover nuanced variations in bias expression within the LLM framework. Importantly, we propose debiasing strategies, including prompt engineering and model fine-tuning. Extensive analysis of bias tendencies across different LLMs sheds light on the broader landscape of bias propagation in language models. This study advances our understanding of LLM bias, offering critical insights into its implications for bias detection tasks and paving the way for more robust and equitable AI systems

Text clustering is a fundamental task in natural language processing with numerous applications. However, traditional clustering methods often struggle with domain-specific fine-tuning and the presence of outliers. To address these challenges, we introduce LLMEdgeRefine, an iterative clustering method enhanced by large language models (LLMs), focusing on edge points refinement. LLMEdgeRefine enhances current clustering methods by creating super-points to mitigate outliers and iteratively refining clusters using LLMs for improved semantic coherence. Our method demonstrates superior performance across multiple datasets, outperforming state-of-the-art techniques, and offering robustness, adaptability, and cost-efficiency for diverse text clustering applications.

This study focuses on media bias detection, crucial in today’s era of influential social media platforms shaping individual attitudes and opinions. In contrast to prior work that primarily relies on training specific models tailored to particular datasets, resulting in limited adaptability and subpar performance on out-of-domain data, we introduce a general bias detection framework, IndiVec, built upon large language models. IndiVec begins by constructing a fine-grained media bias database, leveraging the robust instruction-following capabilities of large language models and vector database techniques. When confronted with new input for bias detection, our framework automatically selects the most relevant indicator from the vector database and employs majority voting to determine the input’s bias label. IndiVec excels compared to previous methods due to its adaptability (demonstrating consistent performance across diverse datasets from various sources) and explainability (providing explicit top-k indicators to interpret bias predictions). Experimental results on four political bias datasets highlight IndiVec’s significant superiority over baselines. Furthermore, additional experiments and analysis provide profound insights into the framework’s effectiveness.