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Fine-tuned language models have been shown to exhibit biases against protected groups in a host of modeling tasks such as text classification and coreference resolution. Previous works focus on detecting these biases, reducing bias in data…
Humanness is core to speech interface design. Yet little is known about how users conceptualise perceptions of humanness and how people define their interaction with speech interfaces through this. To map these perceptions n=21 participants…
The NLP research community has made publicly available numerous instruments for measuring representational harms caused by large language model (LLM)-based systems. These instruments have taken the form of datasets, metrics, tools, and…
Online harms, such as hate speech, misinformation, harassment and self-harm promotion, continue to be widespread. While some work suggests that women are disproportionately affected by such harms, other studies find little evidence for…
As text generation systems' outputs are increasingly anthropomorphic -- perceived as human-like -- scholars have also increasingly raised concerns about how such outputs can lead to harmful outcomes, such as users over-relying or developing…
Large Language Model-powered conversational agents (CAs) are increasingly capable of projecting sophisticated personalities through language, but how these projections affect users is unclear. We thus examine how CA personalities expressed…
In perpetrator treatment, a recurring observation is the dissociation between insight and action: offenders articulate remorse yet behavioral change does not follow. We report four preregistered studies (1,584 multi-agent simulations across…
Text-to-image (T2I) models have emerged as a significant advancement in generative AI; however, there exist safety concerns regarding their potential to produce harmful image outputs even when users input seemingly safe prompts. This…
Unsupervised speech representation learning has shown remarkable success at finding representations that correlate with phonetic structures and improve downstream speech recognition performance. However, most research has been focused on…
Speech is becoming increasingly popular as an interface modality, especially in hands- and eyes-busy situations where the use of a keyboard or mouse is difficult. However, despite the fact that many have hailed speech as being inherently…
The radical advances in telecommunications and computer science have enabled a myriad of applications and novel seamless interaction with computing interfaces. Voice Assistants (VAs) have become a norm for smartphones, and millions of VAs…
For artificial intelligence to be beneficial to humans the behaviour of AI agents needs to be aligned with what humans want. In this paper we discuss some behavioural issues for language agents, arising from accidental misspecification by…
Cancer survivors experience a wide range of impairments arising from cancer or its treatment, such as chemo brain, visual impairments, and physical impairments. These impairments degrade their quality of life and potentially make software…
Digital harms can manifest across any interface. Key problems in addressing these harms include the high individuality of harms and the fast-changing nature of digital systems. As a result, we still lack a systematic approach to study harms…
Recent research demonstrates that the nascent fine-tuning-as-a-service business model exposes serious safety concerns: fine-tuning with a few harmful data uploaded from the users can compromise the safety alignment of the model. The attack,…
Mental health assessments are of central importance to individuals' well-being. Conventional assessment methodologies predominantly depend on clinical interviews and standardised self-report questionnaires. Nevertheless, the efficacy of…
Social media platforms have become central to modern communication, yet they also harbor offensive content that challenges platform safety and inclusivity. While prior research has primarily focused on textual indicators of offense, the…
Hundreds of millions of people now interact with language models, with uses ranging from serving as a writing aid to informing hiring decisions. Yet these language models are known to perpetuate systematic racial prejudices, making their…
As the influence of large language models (LLMs) spans across global communities, their safety challenges in multilingual settings become paramount for alignment research. This paper examines the variations in safety challenges faced by…
As LLMs are increasingly deployed in global applications, the importance of cultural sensitivity becomes paramount, ensuring that users from diverse backgrounds feel respected and understood. Cultural harm can arise when these models fail…