Papers by Julia Watson
Do language models practice what they preach? Examining language ideologies about gendered language reform encoded in LLMs (2025.coling-main)
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| Challenge: | Language ideologies are evaluative ideas or beliefs about language, such as ideas about what is "correct", "natural" or "articulate". |
| Approach: | They use gender-neutral variants more often when more explicit metalinguistic context is provided. |
| Outcome: | The findings show that language ideologies in LLMs can vary, which may be unexpected to users. |
What social attitudes about gender does BERT encode? Leveraging insights from psycholinguistics (2023.acl-long)
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| Challenge: | Much research has focused on evaluating whether large language models encode stereotypical/harmful associations. |
| Approach: | They propose to use two datasets from human experiments to examine how word preferences in a large language model reflect social attitudes about gender. |
| Outcome: | The language model BERT takes into account factors that shape human lexical choice of such language, but may not weigh those factors in the same way people do. |
Investigating Online Community Engagement through Stancetaking (2023.findings-emnlp)
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| Challenge: | Large-scale computational work on stancetaking has explored community similarities in their preferences for stance markers without considering the stance-relevant properties of the contexts in which stance marker use is carried out. |
| Approach: | They propose to use stance-relevant properties of Reddit communities to capture community identity patterns distinct from textual or marker similarity measures. |
| Outcome: | The proposed representations capture community identity patterns distinct from textual or marker similarity measures and relate them to broader inter- and intra-community engagement patterns. |