Arnav Arora

Yuxia Wang, Revanth Gangi Reddy, Zain Muhammad Mujahid et al.

The increased use of large language models (LLMs) across a variety of real-world applications calls for mechanisms to verify the factual accuracy of their outputs. In this work, we present a holistic end-to-end solution for annotating the factuality of LLM-generated responses, which encompasses a multi-stage annotation scheme designed to yield detailed labels concerning the verifiability and factual inconsistencies found in LLM outputs. We further construct an open-domain document-level factuality benchmark in three-level granularity: claim, sentence and document, aiming to facilitate the evaluation of automatic fact-checking systems. Preliminary experiments show that FacTool, FactScore and Perplexity.ai are struggling to identify false claims, with the best F1=0.63 by this annotation solution based on GPT-4. Annotation tool, benchmark and code are available at https://github.com/yuxiaw/Factcheck-GPT.

Arnav Arora, Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Isabelle Augenstein

Language embeds information about social, cultural, and political values people hold. Prior work has explored social and potentially harmful biases encoded in Pre-Trained Language models (PTLMs). However, there has been no systematic study investigating how values embedded in these models vary across cultures. In this paper, we introduce probes to study which values across cultures are embedded in these models, and whether they align with existing theories and cross-cultural value surveys. We find that PTLMs capture differences in values across cultures, but those only weakly align with established value surveys. We discuss implications of using mis-aligned models in cross-cultural settings, as well as ways of aligning PTLMs with value surveys.

Erik Arakelyan, Arnav Arora, Isabelle Augenstein

Stance Detection is concerned with identifying the attitudes expressed by an author towards a target of interest. This task spans a variety of domains ranging from social media opinion identification to detecting the stance for a legal claim. However, the framing of the task varies within these domains, in terms of the data collection protocol, the label dictionary and the number of available annotations. Furthermore, these stance annotations are significantly imbalanced on a per-topic and inter-topic basis. These make multi-domain stance detection a challenging task, requiring standardization and domain adaptation. To overcome this challenge, we propose $\textbf{T}$opic $\textbf{E}$fficient $\textbf{St}$anc$\textbf{E}$ $\textbf{D}$etection (TESTED), consisting of a topic-guided diversity sampling technique and a contrastive objective that is used for fine-tuning a stance classifier. We evaluate the method on an existing benchmark of $16$ datasets with in-domain, i.e. all topics seen and out-of-domain, i.e. unseen topics, experiments. The results show that our method outperforms the state-of-the-art with an average of $3.5$ F1 points increase in-domain, and is more generalizable with an averaged increase of $10.2$ F1 on out-of-domain evaluation while using $\leq10\%$ of the training data. We show that our sampling technique mitigates both inter- and per-topic class imbalances. Finally, our analysis demonstrates that the contrastive learning objective allows the model a more pronounced segmentation of samples with varying labels.

Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Arnav Arora, Zeerak Talat et al.

Dual use, the intentional, harmful reuse of technology and scientific artefacts, is a problem yet to be well-defined within the context of Natural Language Processing (NLP). However, as NLP technologies continue to advance and become increasingly widespread in society, their inner workings have become increasingly opaque. Therefore, understanding dual use concerns and potential ways of limiting them is critical to minimising the potential harms of research and development. In this paper, we conduct a survey of NLP researchers and practitioners to understand the depth and their perspective of the problem as well as to assess existing available support. Based on the results of our survey, we offer a definition of dual use that is tailored to the needs of the NLP community. The survey revealed that a majority of researchers are concerned about the potential dual use of their research but only take limited action toward it. In light of the survey results, we discuss the current state and potential means for mitigating dual use in NLP and propose a checklist that can be integrated into existing conference ethics-frameworks, e.g., the ACL ethics checklist.

Lucie-Aimée Kaffee, Arnav Arora, Isabelle Augenstein

The moderation of content on online platforms is usually non-transparent. On Wikipedia, however, this discussion is carried out publicly and the editors are encouraged to use the content moderation policies as explanations for making moderation decisions. Currently, only a few comments explicitly mention those policies -- 20% of the English ones, but as few as 2% of the German and Turkish comments. To aid in this process of understanding how content is moderated, we construct a novel multilingual dataset of Wikipedia editor discussions along with their reasoning in three languages. The dataset contains the stances of the editors (keep, delete, merge, comment), along with the stated reason, and a content moderation policy, for each edit decision. We demonstrate that stance and corresponding reason (policy) can be predicted jointly with a high degree of accuracy, adding transparency to the decision-making process. We release both our joint prediction models and the multilingual content moderation dataset for further research on automated transparent content moderation.

Arnav Arora, Maha Jinadoss, Cheshta Arora et al.

Online gender based violence has grown concomitantly with adoption of the internet and social media. Its effects are worse in the Global majority where many users use social media in languages other than English. The scale and volume of conversations on the internet has necessitated the need for automated detection of hate speech, and more specifically gendered abuse. There is, however, a lack of language specific and contextual data to build such automated tools. In this paper we present a dataset on gendered abuse in three languages- Hindi, Tamil and Indian English. The dataset comprises of tweets annotated along three questions pertaining to the experience of gender abuse, by experts who identify as women or a member of the LGBTQIA community in South Asia. Through this dataset we demonstrate a participatory approach to creating datasets that drive AI systems.

Arnav Arora, Natalie Schluter, Katherine Metcalf et al.

Conversational Large Language Models are post-trained on language that expresses specific behavioural traits, such as curiosity, open-mindedness, and empathy, and values, such as helpfulness, harmlessness, and honesty. This is done to increase utility, ensure safety, and improve the experience of the people interacting with the model. However, values are complex and inter-related -- inducing one could modify behaviour on another. Further, inducing certain values can make models more addictive or sycophantic through language used in the generations, with a potential detrimental effect on the user. We investigate these and other unintended effects of value induction into models. We fine-tune models using curated value subsets of existing preference datasets, measuring the impact of value induction on expression of other values, model safety, anthropomorphic language, and various QA benchmarks. We find that (i) inducing values leads to expression of other related, and sometimes contrastive values, (ii) inducing positive values increases safety, and (iii) all values increase anthropomorphic language use, making models more validating and sycophantic.

Siddhesh Pawar, Junyeong Park, Jiho Jin et al.

Large-scale deployment of large language models (LLMs) in various applications, such as chatbots and virtual assistants, requires LLMs to be culturally sensitive to the user to ensure inclusivity. Culture has been widely studied in psychology and anthropology, and there has been a recent surge in research on making LLMs more culturally inclusive in LLMs that goes beyond multilinguality and builds on findings from psychology and anthropology. In this paper, we survey efforts towards incorporating cultural awareness into text-based and multimodal LLMs. We start by defining cultural awareness in LLMs, taking the definitions of culture from anthropology and psychology as a point of departure. We then examine methodologies adopted for creating cross-cultural datasets, strategies for cultural inclusion in downstream tasks, and methodologies that have been used for benchmarking cultural awareness in LLMs. Further, we discuss the ethical implications of cultural alignment, the role of Human-Computer Interaction in driving cultural inclusion in LLMs, and the role of cultural alignment in driving social science research. We finally provide pointers to future research based on our findings about gaps in the literature.

Yong Cao, Haijiang Liu, Arnav Arora et al.

Large-scale surveys are essential tools for informing social science research and policy, but running surveys is costly and time-intensive. If we could accurately simulate group-level survey results, this would therefore be very valuable to social science research. Prior work has explored the use of large language models (LLMs) for simulating human behaviors, mostly through prompting. In this paper, we are the first to specialize LLMs for the task of simulating survey response distributions. As a testbed, we use country-level results from two global cultural surveys. We devise a fine-tuning method based on first-token probabilities to minimize divergence between predicted and actual response distributions for a given question. Then, we show that this method substantially outperforms other methods and zero-shot classifiers, even on unseen questions, countries, and a completely unseen survey. While even our best models struggle with the task, especially on unseen questions, our results demonstrate the benefits of specialization for simulation, which may accelerate progress towards sufficiently accurate simulation in the future.

Siddhesh Pawar, Arnav Arora, Lucie-Aimée Kaffee et al.

Names are deeply tied to human identity. They can serve as markers of individuality, cultural heritage, and personal history. However, using names as a core indicator of identity can lead to over-simplification of complex identities. When interacting with LLMs, user names are an important point of information for personalisation. Names can enter chatbot conversations through direct user input (requested by chatbots), as part of task contexts such as CV reviews, or as built-in memory features that store user information for personalisation. We study biases associated with names by measuring cultural presumptions in the responses generated by LLMs when presented with common suggestion-seeking queries, which might involve making assumptions about the user. Our analyses demonstrate strong assumptions about cultural identity associated with names present in LLM generations across multiple cultures. Our work has implications for designing more nuanced personalisation systems that avoid reinforcing stereotypes while maintaining meaningful customisation.

Lovisa Hagström, Sara Vera Marjanović, Haeun Yu et al.

Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) helps address the limitations of parametric knowledge embedded within a language model (LM). In real world settings, retrieved information can vary in complexity, yet most investigations of LM utilisation of context has been limited to synthetic text. We introduce DRUID (Dataset of Retrieved Unreliable, Insufficient and Difficult-to-understand contexts) with real-world queries and contexts manually annotated for stance. The dataset is based on the prototypical task of automated claim verification, for which automated retrieval of real-world evidence is crucial. We compare DRUID to synthetic datasets (CounterFact, ConflictQA) and find that artificial datasets often fail to represent the complexity and diversity of realistically retrieved context. We show that synthetic datasets exaggerate context characteristics rare in real retrieved data, which leads to inflated context utilisation results, as measured by our novel ACU score. Moreover, while previous work has mainly focused on singleton context characteristics to explain context utilisation, correlations between singleton context properties and ACU on DRUID are surprisingly small compared to other properties related to context source. Overall, our work underscores the need for real-world aligned context utilisation studies to represent and improve performance in real-world RAG settings.

Arnav Arora, Srishti Yadav, Maria Antoniak et al.

Automated frame analysis of political communication is a popular task in computational social science that is used to study how authors select aspects of a topic to frame its reception. So far, such studies have been narrow, in that they use a fixed set of pre-defined frames and focus only on the text, ignoring the visual contexts in which those texts appear. Especially for framing in the news, this leaves out valuable information about editorial choices, which include not just the written article but also accompanying photographs. To overcome such limitations, we present a method for conducting multi-modal, multi-label framing analysis at scale using large (vision-) language models. Grounding our work in framing theory, we extract latent meaning embedded in images used to convey a certain point and contrast that to the text by comparing the respective frames used. We also identify highly partisan framing of topics with issue-specific frame analysis found in prior qualitative work. We demonstrate a method for doing scalable integrative framing analysis of both text and image in news, providing a more complete picture for understanding media bias.

Piyush Jha, Arnav Arora, Vijay Ganesh

We introduce LLMStinger, a novel approach that leverages Large Language Models (LLMs) to automatically generate adversarial suffixes for jailbreak attacks. Unlike traditional methods, which require complex prompt engineering or white-box access, LLMStinger uses a reinforcement learning (RL) loop to fine-tune an attacker LLM, generating new suffixes based on existing attacks for harmful questions from the HarmBench benchmark. Our method significantly outperforms existing red-teaming approaches (we compared against 15 of the latest methods), achieving a +57.2% improvement in Attack Success Rate (ASR) on LLaMA2-7B-chat and a +50.3% ASR increase on Claude 2, both models known for their extensive safety measures. Additionally, we achieved a 94.97% ASR on GPT-3.5 and 99.4% on Gemma-2B-it, demonstrating the robustness and adaptability of LLMStinger across open and closed-source models.

João A. Leite, Arnav Arora, Silvia Gargova et al.

Large Language Models (LLMs) can generate human-like disinformation, yet their ability to personalise such content across languages and demographics remains underexplored. This study presents the first large-scale, multilingual analysis of persona-targeted disinformation generation by LLMs. Employing a red teaming methodology, we prompt eight state-of-the-art LLMs with 324 false narratives and 150 demographic personas (combinations of country, generation, and political orientation) across four languages--English, Russian, Portuguese, and Hindi--resulting in AI-TRAITS, a comprehensive dataset of 1.6 million personalised disinformation texts. Results show that the use of even simple personalisation prompts significantly increases the likelihood of jailbreaks across all studied LLMs, up to 10 percentage points, and alters linguistic and rhetorical patterns that enhance narrative persuasiveness. Models such as Grok and GPT exhibited jailbreak rates and personalisation scores both exceeding 85%. These insights expose critical vulnerabilities in current state-of-the-art LLMs and offer a foundation for improving safety alignment and detection strategies in multilingual and cross-demographic contexts.

Sekh Mainul Islam, Nadav Borenstein, Siddhesh Milind Pawar et al.

Understanding biases and stereotypes encoded in the weights of Large Language Models (LLMs) is crucial for developing effective mitigation strategies. Biased behaviour is often subtle and non-trivial to isolate, even when deliberately elicited, making systematic analysis and debiasing particularly challenging. To address this, we introduce BiasGym, a simple, cost-effective, and generalizable framework for reliably injecting, analyzing, and mitigating conceptual associations within LLMs. BiasGym consists of two components: BiasInject, which injects specific biases into the model via token-based fine-tuning while keeping the model frozen, and BiasScope, which leverages these injected signals to identify and steer the components responsible for biased behavior. Our method enables consistent bias elicitation for mechanistic analysis, supports targeted debiasing without degrading performance on downstream tasks, and generalizes to biases unseen during token-based fine-tuning. We demonstrate the effectiveness of BiasGym in reducing real-world stereotypes (e.g., people from Italy being `reckless drivers') and in probing fictional associations (e.g., people from a fictional country having `blue skin'), showing its utility for both safety interventions and interpretability research.

Avneet Kaur, Arnav Arora

Framing used by news media, especially in times of conflict, can have substantial impact on readers' opinion, potentially aggravating the conflict itself. Current studies on the topic of conflict framing have limited insights due to their qualitative nature or only look at surface level generic frames without going deeper. In this work, we identify indicators of war and peace journalism, as outlined by prior work in conflict studies, in a corpus of news articles reporting on the Israel-Palestine war. For our analysis, we use computational approaches, using a combination of frame semantics and large language models to identify both communicative framing and its connection to linguistic framing. Our analysis reveals a higher focus on war based reporting rather than peace based. We also show substantial differences in reporting across the US, UK, and Middle Eastern news outlets in framing who the assailant and victims of the conflict are, surfacing biases within the media.

Dustin Wright, Arnav Arora, Nadav Borenstein et al.

Uncovering latent values and opinions embedded in large language models (LLMs) can help identify biases and mitigate potential harm. Recently, this has been approached by prompting LLMs with survey questions and quantifying the stances in the outputs towards morally and politically charged statements. However, the stances generated by LLMs can vary greatly depending on how they are prompted, and there are many ways to argue for or against a given position. In this work, we propose to address this by analysing a large and robust dataset of 156k LLM responses to the 62 propositions of the Political Compass Test (PCT) generated by 6 LLMs using 420 prompt variations. We perform coarse-grained analysis of their generated stances and fine-grained analysis of the plain text justifications for those stances. For fine-grained analysis, we propose to identify tropes in the responses: semantically similar phrases that are recurrent and consistent across different prompts, revealing natural patterns in the text that a given LLM is prone to produce. We find that demographic features added to prompts significantly affect outcomes on the PCT, reflecting bias, as well as disparities between the results of tests when eliciting closed-form vs. open domain responses. Additionally, patterns in the plain text rationales via tropes show that similar justifications are repeatedly generated across models and prompts even with disparate stances.

Aatman Vaidya, Arnav Arora, Aditya Joshi et al.

This paper reports the findings of the ICON 2023 on Gendered Abuse Detection in Indic Languages. The shared task deals with the detection of gendered abuse in online text. The shared task was conducted as a part of ICON 2023, based on a novel dataset in Hindi, Tamil and the Indian dialect of English. The participants were given three subtasks with the train dataset consisting of approximately 6500 posts sourced from Twitter. For the test set, approximately 1200 posts were provided. The shared task received a total of 9 registrations. The best F-1 scores are 0.616 for subtask 1, 0.572 for subtask 2 and, 0.616 and 0.582 for subtask 3. The paper contains examples of hateful content owing to its topic.

Momchil Hardalov, Arnav Arora, Preslav Nakov et al.

The goal of stance detection is to determine the viewpoint expressed in a piece of text towards a target. These viewpoints or contexts are often expressed in many different languages depending on the user and the platform, which can be a local news outlet, a social media platform, a news forum, etc. Most research in stance detection, however, has been limited to working with a single language and on a few limited targets, with little work on cross-lingual stance detection. Moreover, non-English sources of labelled data are often scarce and present additional challenges. Recently, large multilingual language models have substantially improved the performance on many non-English tasks, especially such with limited numbers of examples. This highlights the importance of model pre-training and its ability to learn from few examples. In this paper, we present the most comprehensive study of cross-lingual stance detection to date: we experiment with 15 diverse datasets in 12 languages from 6 language families, and with 6 low-resource evaluation settings each. For our experiments, we build on pattern-exploiting training, proposing the addition of a novel label encoder to simplify the verbalisation procedure. We further propose sentiment-based generation of stance data for pre-training, which shows sizeable improvement of more than 6% F1 absolute in low-shot settings compared to several strong baselines.

Momchil Hardalov, Arnav Arora, Preslav Nakov et al.

Stance detection concerns the classification of a writer's viewpoint towards a target. There are different task variants, e.g., stance of a tweet vs. a full article, or stance with respect to a claim vs. an (implicit) topic. Moreover, task definitions vary, which includes the label inventory, the data collection, and the annotation protocol. All these aspects hinder cross-domain studies, as they require changes to standard domain adaptation approaches. In this paper, we perform an in-depth analysis of 16 stance detection datasets, and we explore the possibility for cross-domain learning from them. Moreover, we propose an end-to-end unsupervised framework for out-of-domain prediction of unseen, user-defined labels. In particular, we combine domain adaptation techniques such as mixture of experts and domain-adversarial training with label embeddings, and we demonstrate sizable performance gains over strong baselines, both (i) in-domain, i.e., for seen targets, and (ii) out-of-domain, i.e., for unseen targets. Finally, we perform an exhaustive analysis of the cross-domain results, and we highlight the important factors influencing the model performance.

Momchil Hardalov, Arnav Arora, Preslav Nakov et al.

Understanding attitudes expressed in texts, also known as stance detection, plays an important role in systems for detecting false information online, be it misinformation (unintentionally false) or disinformation (intentionally false information). Stance detection has been framed in different ways, including (a) as a component of fact-checking, rumour detection, and detecting previously fact-checked claims, or (b) as a task in its own right. While there have been prior efforts to contrast stance detection with other related tasks such as argumentation mining and sentiment analysis, there is no existing survey on examining the relationship between stance detection and mis- and disinformation detection. Here, we aim to bridge this gap by reviewing and analysing existing work in this area, with mis- and disinformation in focus, and discussing lessons learnt and future challenges.

Arnav Arora, Preslav Nakov, Momchil Hardalov et al.

The proliferation of harmful content on online platforms is a major societal problem, which comes in many different forms including hate speech, offensive language, bullying and harassment, misinformation, spam, violence, graphic content, sexual abuse, self harm, and many other. Online platforms seek to moderate such content to limit societal harm, to comply with legislation, and to create a more inclusive environment for their users. Researchers have developed different methods for automatically detecting harmful content, often focusing on specific sub-problems or on narrow communities, as what is considered harmful often depends on the platform and on the context. We argue that there is currently a dichotomy between what types of harmful content online platforms seek to curb, and what research efforts there are to automatically detect such content. We thus survey existing methods as well as content moderation policies by online platforms in this light and we suggest directions for future work.

Wojciech Ostrowski, Arnav Arora, Pepa Atanasova et al.

Recent work has proposed multi-hop models and datasets for studying complex natural language reasoning. One notable task requiring multi-hop reasoning is fact checking, where a set of connected evidence pieces leads to the final verdict of a claim. However, existing datasets either do not provide annotations for gold evidence pages, or the only dataset which does (FEVER) mostly consists of claims which can be fact-checked with simple reasoning and is constructed artificially. Here, we study more complex claim verification of naturally occurring claims with multiple hops over interconnected evidence chunks. We: 1) construct a small annotated dataset, PolitiHop, of evidence sentences for claim verification; 2) compare it to existing multi-hop datasets; and 3) study how to transfer knowledge from more extensive in- and out-of-domain resources to PolitiHop. We find that the task is complex and achieve the best performance with an architecture that specifically models reasoning over evidence pieces in combination with in-domain transfer learning.