arXiv Computation and Language

Reliable but Design-Sensitive: Instrument Uncertainty in LLM Annotation

The study demonstrates that large language models (LLMs) can produce highly reliable labels under a single experimental setup, yet their outputs vary significantly when researchers alter task designs or model choices. By evaluating seven LLMs across 12 task designs and 3,000 tweets for offensive language and hate speech, the authors found that agreement dropped from a median Fleiss' κ of 0.91 to a median Cohen's κ of 0.76 when task designs changed. This design sensitivity inflates prevalence estimates by up to 110.6 times compared to sampling variance alone, and confidence scores fail to mitigate the issue.

arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 27

From Specialization to Generalization: Instruction-tuned LLMs for Robust Harmful Content Mitigation

The paper presents an instruction‑tuned large language model (LLM) based on Qwen3 that is fine‑tuned for hate speech mitigation by unifying 36 English hate speech datasets. The authors show that this generalist LLM achieves state‑of‑the‑art performance on in‑domain benchmarks and delivers significant gains in cross‑domain and cross‑lingual generalization, outperforming specialist encoder‑based classifiers.

By Lukas Edman, Daryna Dementieva, Alexander Fraser
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 1

When Hate Meets Facts: LLMs-in-the-Loop for Check-worthiness Detection in Hate Speech

The paper introduces WSF-ARG+, a new dataset that pairs hate speech with check‑worthiness annotations, and presents an LLM‑in‑the‑loop framework to streamline the annotation process. Experiments with 12 open‑weight large language models demonstrate that the framework cuts human effort while maintaining annotation quality. The study also shows that incorporating check‑worthiness labels improves hate‑speech detection performance, boosting macro‑F1 scores for large models by up to 0.213 and averaging 0.154 across models.

By Nicol\'as Benjam\'in Ocampo, Tommaso Caselli, Davide Ceolin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 2

SDARE-Bench: Evaluating Large Language Models on Conversational Stigma Detection and Response in Dyadic and Group Dialogue

arXiv:2609.01548v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large Language Models (LLMs) are increasingly used in advice seeking and decision making that may affect social judgements. Despite stigma's profound e...

By Stephanie Fong, Yiwen Jiang, Zimu Wang, Hongxi Yang, Yaling Shen, Hiu Weh Naomi Chow, Heung Ying Lai, Xiangyu Zhao, Qingyang Xu, Zhongxing Xu, Jiahe Liu, Guilherme C. Oliveira, Vincent Lee, Zongyuan Ge, Dominic Dwyer
arXiv Computation and Language
Aug 25

Whitewashing Hate, Smearing Harmless Content: Annotator-Style Rebuttal Attacks on LLM-Based Moderation

The paper investigates how annotator-style rebuttals can manipulate large language model (LLM) moderation systems, either by whitewashing hateful content as normal or smearing normal content as hateful. Using a rejudge protocol that adds decision‑boundary perturbations and adversarial rationales, the authors show that such rebuttals significantly degrade moderation performance, especially in multi‑turn settings. The study finds consistent, model‑specific asymmetries between the two manipulation directions and demonstrates that explicit reasoning prompts and defensive instructions mitigate but do not eliminate the vulnerability.

By Junyu Lu, Kaiyuan Liu, Jingyi Kang, Deyi Ji, Hailong Zhang, Lanyun Zhu, Qi Zhu, Bo Xu, Liang Yang, Hongfei Lin
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 3

The Enforcement and Feasibility of Hate Speech Moderation

The study audits hate‑speech moderation on Twitter (now X) using 540,000 annotated tweets from a full day. Eighty percent of hateful tweets, including violent content, remained online after five months, and removal was only slightly more likely than for non‑hateful tweets, far below the rates for scams or adult content. Automated detection could not reliably classify hate but ranked it highly, allowing human triage; however, current staffing curbed little exposure, while substantial reductions were financially feasible and far below applicable regulatory fines.

By Manuel Tonneau, Dylan Thurgood, Diyi Liu, Niyati Malhotra, Victor Orozco-Olvera, Ralph Schroeder, Scott A. Hale, Manoel Horta Ribeiro, Paul R\"ottger, Samuel P. Fraiberger
arXiv Machine Learning
Sep 11

When Noise Fabricates Bias: The Fragility of LLM-as-a-Judge Bias Measurement under Noisy Text

Large language models (LLMs) are increasingly used to assess social bias in text, but the passages they evaluate often contain surface noise such as typos and broken punctuation. This study applied five realistic noise conditions at varying intensities to 3,822 stereotype‑related responses and compared bias judgments on noisy versus original text. The findings show that noise disproportionately turns neutral judgments into biased ones—up to 120 times more likely—while rarely converting biased judgments into neutral ones, and that the most fragile LLM judge exhibits the greatest distortion at mild noise levels. As LLMs become more robust, the bias distortion tends toward parity rather than reversal, meaning bias measured on noisy text is systematically overestimated, especially in fairness‑critical categories.

By DongHyun Ryu, Jaehyeok Lee, YeongJun Hwang, JinYeong Bak