Mohammed Fayiz Parappan
Author directory2026
Labels have Human Values: Value Calibration of Subjective Tasks
Mohammed Fayiz Parappan | Ricardo Henao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mohammed Fayiz Parappan | Ricardo Henao
Proceedings of the 2026 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Although pluralistic societies exhibit diverse human values that lead to legitimate disagreements in subjective tasks (e.g., safety and preference judgments), NLP models trained on such subjective labels often ignore latent value structures, resulting in miscalibrated predictions over relevant value classes. We propose MultiCalibrated Subjective Task Learning (MC-STL), a framework that identifies latent value groups from annotations (via label rationale similarity, expert value taxonomies, or annotator sociocultural descriptors) and enforces value-conditional calibration through value group-specific representations. MC-STL applies to binary, ordinal, and preference learning settings, and is evaluated on multiple datasets covering toxic chatbot conversations, value reasoning, T2I-safety and preference alignment. The results demonstrate that MC-STL consistently outperforms existing baselines, achieving multicalibration across relevant value groups, while delivering gains in probabilistic prediction performance.
2025
Learning Subjective Label Distributions via Sociocultural Descriptors
Mohammed Fayiz Parappan | Ricardo Henao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Mohammed Fayiz Parappan | Ricardo Henao
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Subjectivity in NLP tasks, e.g., toxicity classification, has emerged as a critical challenge precipitated by the increased deployment of NLP systems in content-sensitive domains. Conventional approaches aggregate annotator judgements (labels), ignoring minority perspectives, and overlooking the influence of the sociocultural context behind such annotations. We propose a framework where subjectivity in binary labels is modeled as an empirical distribution accounting for the variation in annotators through human values extracted from sociocultural descriptors using a language model. The framework also allows for downstream tasks such as population and sociocultural group-level majority label prediction. Experiments on three toxicity datasets covering human-chatbot conversations and social media posts annotated with diverse annotator pools demonstrate that our approach yields well-calibrated toxicity distribution predictions across binary toxicity labels, which are further used for majority label prediction across cultural subgroups, improving over existing methods.