Multi-Perspective LLM Annotations for Valid Analyses in Subjective Tasks

arXiv cs.CL / 3/24/2026

💬 OpinionIdeas & Deep AnalysisModels & Research

Key Points

  • The paper argues that LLM-based text annotation can encode uneven human perspectives, making single ground-truth correction methods inadequate for subjective tasks with meaningful demographic disagreement.
  • It proposes “Perspective-Driven Inference,” which models the annotation distribution across demographic groups as the target quantity to estimate under limited human annotation budgets.
  • An adaptive sampling strategy is introduced to allocate annotation effort to groups where LLM “proxy” signals are least accurate, improving efficiency.
  • Experiments on politeness and offensiveness rating tasks show targeted gains for more difficult demographic groups versus uniform sampling baselines while preserving coverage.
  • The work is positioned as a more analysis-valid approach for using LLMs in subjective evaluation settings where group-wise differences matter.

Abstract

Large language models are increasingly used to annotate texts, but their outputs reflect some human perspectives better than others. Existing methods for correcting LLM annotation error assume a single ground truth. However, this assumption fails in subjective tasks where disagreement across demographic groups is meaningful. Here we introduce Perspective-Driven Inference, a method that treats the distribution of annotations across groups as the quantity of interest, and estimates it using a small human annotation budget. We contribute an adaptive sampling strategy that concentrates human annotation effort on groups where LLM proxies are least accurate. We evaluate on politeness and offensiveness rating tasks, showing targeted improvements for harder-to-model demographic groups relative to uniform sampling baselines, while maintaining coverage.