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arXiv · 2410.04315

Calibrating Expressions of Certainty

Peiqi Wang·Barbara D. Lam·Yingcheng Liu·Ameneh Asgari-Targhi·Rameswar Panda·William M. Wells·Tina Kapur·Polina Golland
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Abstract

We present a novel approach to calibrating linguistic expressions of certainty, e.g., "Maybe" and "Likely". Unlike prior work that assigns a single score to each certainty phrase, we model uncertainty as distributions over the simplex to capture their semantics more accurately. To accommodate this new representation of certainty, we generalize existing measures of miscalibration and introduce a novel post-hoc calibration method. Leveraging these tools, we analyze the calibration of both humans (e.g., radiologists) and computational models (e.g., language models) and provide interpretable suggestions to improve their calibration.

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Peiqi Wang, Barbara D. Lam, Yingcheng Liu, Ameneh Asgari-Targhi, Rameswar Panda, William M. Wells, Tina Kapur, Polina Golland. 2024-10-06. Calibrating Expressions of Certainty. https://arxiv.org/abs/2410.04315

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