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“Seeing the Big through the Small”: Can LLMs Approximate Human Judgment Distributions on NLI from a Few Explanations?

Paper · 2024 · Beiduo Chen, Xinpeng Wang, Siyao Peng et al.

Summary

When several annotators disagree on an NLI item for legitimate reasons, the spread of their labels is informative, and researchers capture it as a human judgment distribution (HJD). Building HJDs usually means paying around a hundred crowd workers per item. Expert datasets are much smaller but come with written explanations. This paper asks whether LLMs can recover a crowd-scale HJD from just a handful of expert explanations.

The authors turn NLI items into multiple-choice prompts. They add the four annotators' explanations from VariErr NLI, either with or without the annotators' labels. They then read a model judgment distribution (MJD) off the first-token probabilities of Mixtral and Llama3, and compare it to the Chaos NLI distributions collected from 100 workers.

Adding explanations clearly moves the MJDs closer to the HJDs. However, MJDs that score similarly on instance-level distances produce noticeably different results when used to fine-tune BERT and RoBERTa. The authors show that distance correlation, a dataset-wide shape measure, combined with visualization, predicts fine-tuning usefulness better. The result is a cheap route to soft labels and a warning about relying on KL-style evaluation alone.

Key points

  • Data sources. Explanations come from VariErr NLI, written by 4 linguists. The target HJDs come from Chaos NLI, with 100 crowd annotations per item. Related resources are Variation NLI (50 workers) and LiveNLI (5 linguists).
  • Prompt variants. There are three: no explanations, explanations given as "comments" without labels, and explanations paired with their explicit labels.
  • How MJDs are obtained. Probabilities come from the first token over the options A/B/C. The order of the answer options and of the explanations is permuted to reduce bias.
  • Why KL alone misleads. A uniform distribution sits at a KL of 0.364 from Chaos NLI, while MNLI one-hot labels sit at 0.665. The uniform baseline still carries nothing useful for training.
  • Mixtral vs. Llama3. Llama3-derived soft labels fine-tuned better. The authors attribute this to their dataset-level shape being closer to Chaos NLI. Code is released as MJD-Estimator.

Interesting ideas

  • I1. Instead of trusting the LLM's single answer, the authors read a distribution from the probabilities of answer letters and average over shuffled option and explanation orders to cancel position bias.
  • I2. A few short human rationales are expanded by an LLM into a full crowd-like distribution, which multiplies the value of scarce expert annotation.
  • I3. Instance-level distances can rank a label set well even when it is useless for training. The uniform baseline beats one-hot labels on KL, so trivial baselines work as a sanity check on the metric itself.
  • I4. Distance correlation compares the pairwise-distance structure of two whole label sets rather than item-by-item gaps, so it captures whether the global shape of variation matches.
  • I5. Giving the label together with its explanation helped the model avoid misreading hedged wording such as "do not mention", which signals Neutral.

For Mova

How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests:

  • I1 (learn): LLM teacher tiers could emit graded silver labels this way for ambiguous PP attachments or role choices, giving a calibrated confidence rather than one verdict.
  • I2 (frames): when VerbNet role assignment or an implicature is uncertain, short rationales from witness parsers or annotators could be fed to the teacher to yield a soft distribution over frame readings.
  • I3 (learn): evaluation with negative controls should always score uniform and one-hot baselines alongside silver distributions, so that a metric rewarding emptiness is caught.
  • I4 (learn): it could tell whether a candidate silver corpus reproduces the disagreement structure of a gold treebank before committing GPU time to training gparse on it.
  • I5 (answer): school-test readers could pair each candidate answer with its justification, so negation-like phrasing in rationales is not mistaken for contradiction.

Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.

 Institutions

 Fields, topics and concepts

📚 Shelves 4The field of science this work belongs to (OpenAlex fields).Computer Science · 16,667 worksArtificial Intelligence · 16,194 worksArts and Humanities · 16,039 worksLanguage and Linguistics · 15,891 works

🧭 Topics 1Research subjects and languages the work is about.Reasoning · 1,426 works

Cite

Cite as Beiduo Chen, Xinpeng Wang, Siyao Peng, Robert Litschko, Anna Korhonen and Barbara Plank. 2024. “Seeing the Big through the Small”: Can LLMs Approximate Human Judgment Distributions on NLI from a Few Explanations?. Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024.

The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.842

@inproceedings{chen2024seeing,
  title = {{“Seeing the Big through the Small”: Can LLMs Approximate Human Judgment Distributions on NLI from a Few Explanations?}},
  author = {Beiduo Chen, Xinpeng Wang, Siyao Peng, Robert Litschko, Anna Korhonen and Barbara Plank},
  booktitle = {Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024},
  year = {2024},
  doi = {10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.842},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/2024.findings-emnlp.842}
}

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