DeCAP: Context-Adaptive Prompt Generation for Debiasing Zero-shot Question Answering in Large Language Models

Suyoung Bae, YunSeok Choi, Jee-Hyong Lee


Abstract
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel in zero-shot Question Answering (QA), they tend to expose biases in their internal knowledge when faced with socially sensitive questions, leading to a degradation in performance. Existing zero-shot methods are efficient but failto consider context and prevent bias propagation in the answers. To address this, we propose DeCAP, a method for debiasing LLMs usingContext-Adaptive Prompt Generation. DeCAP leverages a Question Ambiguity Detection to take appropriate debiasing actions based on the context and a Neutral Answer Guidance Generation to suppress the LLMs make objective judgments about the context, minimizing thepropagation of bias from their internal knowledge. Our various experiments across eight LLMs show that DeCAP achieves state-of-the-art zero-shot debiased QA performance. This demonstrates DeCAP’s efficacy in enhancing the fairness and accuracy of LLMs in diverseQA settings.
Anthology ID:
2025.naacl-long.624
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
April
Year:
2025
Address:
Albuquerque, New Mexico
Editors:
Luis Chiruzzo, Alan Ritter, Lu Wang
Venue:
NAACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12555–12574
Language:
URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/declare-journal/2025.naacl-long.624/
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2025.naacl-long.624
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Suyoung Bae, YunSeok Choi, and Jee-Hyong Lee. 2025. DeCAP: Context-Adaptive Prompt Generation for Debiasing Zero-shot Question Answering in Large Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference of the Nations of the Americas Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 12555–12574, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
DeCAP: Context-Adaptive Prompt Generation for Debiasing Zero-shot Question Answering in Large Language Models (Bae et al., NAACL 2025)
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PDF:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/declare-journal/2025.naacl-long.624.pdf