Related papers: Causal Effects of Linguistic Properties
When training data are collected from human annotators, the design of the annotation instrument, the instructions given to annotators, the characteristics of the annotators, and their interactions can impact training data. This study…
In studies of discrimination, researchers often seek to estimate a causal effect of race or gender on outcomes. For example, in the criminal justice context, one might ask whether arrested individuals would have been subsequently charged or…
Personality is a psychological factor that reflects people's preferences, which in turn influences their decision-making. We hypothesize that accurate modeling of users' personalities improves recommendation systems' performance. However,…
Existing argumentation datasets have succeeded in allowing researchers to develop computational methods for analyzing the content, structure and linguistic features of argumentative text. They have been much less successful in fostering…
Large language model (LLM) development is currently driven by large-scale empirical iteration over data mixtures, reward models, routing strategies, and evaluation pipelines. Here, we argue that many central questions in LLM development and…
We use structural topic modeling to examine racial bias in data collected to train models to detect hate speech and abusive language in social media posts. We augment the abusive language dataset by adding an additional feature indicating…
Learning individual-level causal effects from observational data, such as inferring the most effective medication for a specific patient, is a problem of growing importance for policy makers. The most important aspect of inferring causal…
The use of abusive language online has become an increasingly pervasive problem that damages both individuals and society, with effects ranging from psychological harm right through to escalation to real-life violence and even death.…
Large Language Models have recently been applied to text annotation tasks from social sciences, equalling or surpassing the performance of human workers at a fraction of the cost. However, no inquiry has yet been made on the impact of…
In many fields$\unicode{x2013}$including genomics, epidemiology, natural language processing, social and behavioral sciences, and economics$\unicode{x2013}$it is increasingly important to address causal questions in the context of factor…
Recent research in psycholinguistics has provided increasing evidence that humans predict upcoming content. Prediction also affects perception and might be a key to robustness in human language processing. In this paper, we investigate the…
User opinions expressed in the form of ratings can influence an individual's view of an item. However, the true quality of an item is often obfuscated by user biases, and it is not obvious from the observed ratings the importance different…
Effective linguistic choices that attract potential customers play crucial roles in advertising success. This study aims to explore the linguistic features of ad texts that influence human preferences. Although the creation of attractive ad…
Causal influence measures for machine learnt classifiers shed light on the reasons behind classification, and aid in identifying influential input features and revealing their biases. However, such analyses involve evaluating the classifier…
The outcomes of elections, product sales, and the structure of social connections are all determined by the choices individuals make when presented with a set of options, so understanding the factors that contribute to choice is crucial. Of…
Predictions about people, such as their expected educational achievement or their credit risk, can be performative and shape the outcome that they aim to predict. Understanding the causal effect of these predictions on the eventual outcomes…
The quality of requirements specifications may impact subsequent, dependent software engineering (SE) activities. However, empirical evidence of this impact remains scarce and too often superficial as studies abstract from the phenomena…
Reward modelling from preference data is a crucial step in aligning large language models (LLMs) with human values, requiring robust generalisation to novel prompt-response pairs. In this work, we propose to frame this problem in a causal…
Heightened AI expectations facilitate performance in human-AI interactions through placebo effects. While lowering expectations to control for placebo effects is advisable, overly negative expectations could induce nocebo effects. In a…
This paper addresses the problem of estimating causal effects when adjustment variables in the back-door or front-door criterion are partially observed. For such scenarios, we derive bounds on the causal effects by solving two non-linear…