Philine Widmer

CL
h-index5
3papers
29citations
Novelty27%
AI Score29

3 Papers

LGOct 24, 2025
Gen-Review: A Large-scale Dataset of AI-Generated (and Human-written) Peer Reviews

Luca Demetrio, Giovanni Apruzzese, Kathrin Grosse et al.

How does the progressive embracement of Large Language Models (LLMs) affect scientific peer reviewing? This multifaceted question is fundamental to the effectiveness -- as well as to the integrity -- of the scientific process. Recent evidence suggests that LLMs may have already been tacitly used in peer reviewing, e.g., at the 2024 International Conference of Learning Representations (ICLR). Furthermore, some efforts have been undertaken in an attempt to explicitly integrate LLMs in peer reviewing by various editorial boards (including that of ICLR'25). To fully understand the utility and the implications of LLMs' deployment for scientific reviewing, a comprehensive relevant dataset is strongly desirable. Despite some previous research on this topic, such dataset has been lacking so far. We fill in this gap by presenting GenReview, the hitherto largest dataset containing LLM-written reviews. Our dataset includes 81K reviews generated for all submissions to the 2018--2025 editions of the ICLR by providing the LLM with three independent prompts: a negative, a positive, and a neutral one. GenReview is also linked to the respective papers and their original reviews, thereby enabling a broad range of investigations. To illustrate the value of GenReview, we explore a sample of intriguing research questions, namely: if LLMs exhibit bias in reviewing (they do); if LLM-written reviews can be automatically detected (so far, they can); if LLMs can rigorously follow reviewing instructions (not always) and whether LLM-provided ratings align with decisions on paper acceptance or rejection (holds true only for accepted papers). GenReview can be accessed at the following link: https://anonymous.4open.science/r/gen_review.

CLJun 20, 2024
Aligning Large Language Models with Diverse Political Viewpoints

Dominik Stammbach, Philine Widmer, Eunjung Cho et al.

Large language models such as ChatGPT exhibit striking political biases. If users query them about political information, they often take a normative stance. To overcome this, we align LLMs with diverse political viewpoints from 100,000 comments written by candidates running for national parliament in Switzerland. Models aligned with this data can generate more accurate political viewpoints from Swiss parties, compared to commercial models such as ChatGPT. We also propose a procedure to generate balanced overviews summarizing multiple viewpoints using such models. The replication package contains all code and data.

GNFeb 15, 2022
Media Slant is Contagious

Philine Widmer, Clémentine Abed Meraim, Sergio Galletta et al.

This paper examines the diffusion of media slant. We document the influence of Fox News Channel (FNC) on the partisan slant of local newspapers in the U.S. over the years 1995-2008. We measure the political slant of local newspapers by scaling the news article texts to Republicans' and Democrats' speeches in Congress. Using channel positioning as an instrument for viewership, we find that higher FNC viewership causes local newspapers to adopt more right-wing slant. The effect emerges gradually, only several years after FNC's introduction, mirroring the channel's growing influence on voting behavior. A main driver of the shift in newspaper slant appears to be a change in local political preferences.