# Not All Subjectivity Is the Same! Defining Desiderata for the Evaluation of Subjectivity in NLP

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2603.28351 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2603.28351/

## Key facts

- No citing papers in the map yet (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 82 of its 142 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 30 Mar 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 30 of 82)

- [Training language models to follow instructions with human feedback](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2203.02155/) (2022)
- [Retrieval-Augmented Generation for Knowledge-Intensive NLP Tasks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2005.11401/) (2020)
- [Direct Preference Optimization: Your Language Model is Secretly a Reward Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.18290/) (2023)
- [Aleatoric and Epistemic Uncertainty in Machine Learning: An Introduction to Concepts and Methods](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.09457/) (2019)
- [Whose Opinions Do Language Models Reflect?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2303.17548/) (2023)
- [Towards Faithfully Interpretable NLP Systems: How should we define and evaluate faithfulness?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2004.03685/) (2020)
- [LaMP: When Large Language Models Meet Personalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.11406/) (2023)
- [Towards Measuring the Representation of Subjective Global Opinions in Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2306.16388/) (2023)
- [Toxicity in ChatGPT: Analyzing Persona-assigned Language Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.05335/) (2023)
- [Humans or LLMs as the Judge? A Study on Judgement Biases](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.10669/) (2024)
- [Dealing with Disagreements: Looking Beyond the Majority Vote in Subjective Annotations](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05719/) (2021)
- [Personalized Soups: Personalized Large Language Model Alignment via Post-hoc Parameter Merging](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2310.11564/) (2023)
- [Annotators with Attitudes: How Annotator Beliefs And Identities Bias Toxic Language Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2111.07997/) (2021)
- [Social Chemistry 101: Learning to Reason about Social and Moral Norms](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.00620/) (2020)
- [Bias Runs Deep: Implicit Reasoning Biases in Persona-Assigned LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.04892/) (2023)
- [Personalizing Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback with Variational Preference Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.10075/) (2024)
- [What Can We Learn from Collective Human Opinions on Natural Language Inference Data?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.03532/) (2020)
- [Large language models that replace human participants can harmfully misportray and flatten identity groups](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2402.01908/) (2024)
- [MultiVerS: Improving scientific claim verification with weak supervision and full-document context](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2112.01640/) (2021)
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- [On Releasing Annotator-Level Labels and Information in Datasets](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.05699/) (2021)
- [We're Afraid Language Models Aren't Modeling Ambiguity](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2304.14399/) (2023)
- [Modular Pluralism: Pluralistic Alignment via Multi-LLM Collaboration](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.15951/) (2024)
- [Detoxifying Language Models Risks Marginalizing Minority Voices](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.06390/) (2021)
- [Deep learning from crowds](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1709.01779/) (2017)
- [Scruples: A Corpus of Community Ethical Judgments on 32,000 Real-Life Anecdotes](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2008.09094/) (2020)
- [Can LLM be a Personalized Judge?](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2406.11657/) (2024)
- [Aligning Language Models to User Opinions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2305.14929/) (2023)
- [Optimization Methods for Personalizing Large Language Models through Retrieval Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2404.05970/) (2024)
- [PersonaGym: Evaluating Persona Agents and LLMs](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.18416/) (2024)

## Abstract (arXiv)

Subjective judgments are part of several NLP datasets and recent work is increasingly prioritizing models whose outputs reflect this diversity of perspectives. Such responses allow us to shed light on minority voices, which are frequently marginalized or obscured by dominant perspectives. It remains a question whether our evaluation practices align with these models' objectives. This position paper proposes seven evaluation desiderata for subjectivity-sensitive models, rooted in how subjectivity is represented in NLP data and models. The desiderata are constructed in a top-down approach, keeping in mind the user-centric impact of such models. We scan the experimental setup of 60 papers and show that various aspects of subjectivity are still understudied: the distinction between ambiguous and polyphonic input, whether subjectivity is effectively expressed to the user, and a lack of interplay between different desiderata, amongst other gaps.