Seeing All Sides: Multi-Perspective In-Context Learning for Subjective NLP

Benedetta Muscato, Yue Li, Gizem Gezici, Zhixue Zhao, Fosca Giannotti


Abstract
Modern language models excel at factual reasoning but struggle with value diversity: the multiplicity of plausible human perspectives. Tasks such as hate speech or sexism detection expose this limitation, where human disagreement captures the diversity of perspectives that models need to account for, rather than dataset noise. In this paper, we explore whether multi-perspective in-context learning (ICL) can align large language models (LLMs) with this diversity without parameter updates. We evaluate four LLMs on five datasets across three languages (English, Arabic, Italian), considering three label-space representations (aggregated hard, disaggregated hard, and disaggregated soft) and five demonstration selection and ordering strategies. Our multi-perspective approach outperforms standard prompting on aggregated English labels, while disaggregated soft predictions better align with human judgments in Arabic and Italian datasets.These findings highlight the importance of perspective-aware LLMs for reducing bias and polarization, while also revealing the challenges of applying ICL to socially sensitive tasks. We further probe the model faithfulness using eXplainable AI (XAI), offering insights into how LLMs handle human disagreement.
Anthology ID:
2026.findings-eacl.137
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026
Month:
March
Year:
2026
Address:
Rabat, Morocco
Editors:
Vera Demberg, Kentaro Inui, Lluís Marquez
Venue:
Findings
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
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Pages:
2622–2638
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-eacl/2026.findings-eacl.137/
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Cite (ACL):
Benedetta Muscato, Yue Li, Gizem Gezici, Zhixue Zhao, and Fosca Giannotti. 2026. Seeing All Sides: Multi-Perspective In-Context Learning for Subjective NLP. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EACL 2026, pages 2622–2638, Rabat, Morocco. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Seeing All Sides: Multi-Perspective In-Context Learning for Subjective NLP (Muscato et al., Findings 2026)
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