arXiv AI By Wonjeong Jo, Gyuwan Kim, Ming Shan Hee

Change the Number, Change the Answer: Assessing Rating Scale Sensitivity in LLM-Based Text Scoring

Read the original on arXiv AI →

The study investigates how different rating scale designs affect scores produced by large language models (LLMs) in text scoring tasks. By varying format, range, and sign across tasks like political leaning, sentiment, and toxicity, the authors find that a single design change can shift normalized scores by about 0.10 and alter the category of roughly 20% of texts. The research highlights that rubric-based prompting does not mitigate this sensitivity and emphasizes the need for robustness checks when using LLMs for scalar scoring.

Machine-generated by The Flow from the publisher's headline and feed description — not written or checked by a human. The full article lives at arXiv AI.

arXiv AI
Sep 3

Rating the Raters: Rasch Measurement Theory for LLM Evaluation

The paper discusses how large language models (LLMs) are used in various evaluation roles—examining benchmarks, judging other models, and rating human content—and frames each as a measurement problem. It proposes using Rasch measurement theory (RMT) to decompose ordinal ratings into distinct facets on a common scale, offering diagnostics for miscalibration and rater bias. A case study applying RMT to the Measuring Hate Speech corpus reveals systematic differences between LLMs and human raters in severity, calibration, robustness, sensitivity, and scale use, suggesting RMT should be part of the evaluation toolkit for LLMs in all roles.

By Pratik S. Sachdeva, Nathan Boudol
arXiv Computation and Language
Sep 30

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.

By Thomas Reiter, Christoph Kern, Fedor Miasnikov, Sofiia Nikolenko, Rob Chew, Stephanie Eckman, Frauke Kreuter