Beyond prompt brittleness: Evaluating the reliability and consistency of political worldviews in LLMs

Due to the widespread use of large language models (LLMs) in ubiquitous systems, we need to understand whether they embed a specific worldview and what these views reflect. Recent studies report that, prompted with political questionnaires, LLMs show left-liberal leanings. However, it is as yet unclear whether these leanings are reliable (robust to prompt variations) and whether the leaning is consistent across policies and political leaning. We propose a series of tests which assess the reliability and consistency of LLMs' stances on political statements based on a dataset of voting-advice questionnaires collected from seven EU countries and annotated for policy domains. We study LLMs ranging in size from 7B to 70B parameters and find that their reliability increases with parameter count. Larger models show overall stronger alignment with left-leaning parties but differ among policy programs: They evince a (left-wing) positive stance towards environment protection, social welfare but also (right-wing) law and order, with no consistent preferences in foreign policy, migration, and economy.

NAP at SemEval-2023 Task 3: Is Less Really More? (Back-)Translation as Data Augmentation Strategies for Detecting Persuasion Techniques

Persuasion techniques detection in news in a multi-lingual setup is non-trivial and comes with challenges, including little training data. Our system successfully leverages (back-)translation as data augmentation strategies with multi-lingual transformer models for the task of detecting persuasion techniques. The automatic and human evaluation of our augmented data allows us to explore whether (back-)translation aid or hinder performance. Our in-depth analyses indicate that both data augmentation strategies boost performance; however, balancing human-produced and machine-generated data seems to be crucial.