Are Stereotypes Leading LLMs’ Zero-Shot Stance Detection ?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Large Language Models inherit stereotypes from their pretraining data, leading to biased behavior toward certain social groups in many Natural Language Processing tasks, such as hateful speech detection or sentiment analysis.Surprisingly, the evaluation of this kind of bias in stance detection methods has been largely overlooked by the community.Stance Detection involves labeling a statement as being against, in favor, or neutral towards a specific target and is among the most sensitive NLP tasks, as it often relates to political leanings.In this paper, we focus on the bias of Large Language Models when performing stance detection in a zero-shot setting.We automatically annotate posts in pre-existing stance detection datasets with two attributes: dialect or vernacular of a specific group and text complexity/readability, to investigate whether these attributes influence the model's stance detection decisions.Our results show that LLMs exhibit significant stereotypes in stance detection tasks, such as incorrectly associating pro-marijuana views with low text complexity and African American dialect with opposition to Donald Trump.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".