PERSEVAL: A Framework for Perspectivist Classification Evaluation

Soda Marem Lo, Silvia Casola, Erhan Sezerer, Valerio Basile, Franco Sansonetti, Antonio Uva, Davide Bernardi


Abstract
Data perspectivism goes beyond majority vote label aggregation by recognizing various perspectives as legitimate ground truths.However, current evaluation practices remain fragmented, making it difficult to compare perspectivist approaches and analyze their impact on different users and demographic subgroups. To address this gap, we introduce PersEval, the first unified framework for evaluating perspectivist models in NLP. A key innovation is its evaluation at the individual annotator level and its treatment of annotators and users as distinct entities, consistently with real-world scenarios. We demonstrate PersEval’s capabilities through experiments with both Encoder-based and Decoder-based approaches, as well as an analysis of the effect of sociodemographic prompting. By considering global, text-, trait- and user-level evaluation metrics, we show that PersEval is a powerful tool for examining how models are influenced by user-specific information and identifying the biases this information may introduce.
Anthology ID:
2025.emnlp-main.1137
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2025
Address:
Suzhou, China
Editors:
Christos Christodoulopoulos, Tanmoy Chakraborty, Carolyn Rose, Violet Peng
Venue:
EMNLP
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Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
22345–22370
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URL:
https://preview.aclanthology.org/ingest-emnlp/2025.emnlp-main.1137/
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Cite (ACL):
Soda Marem Lo, Silvia Casola, Erhan Sezerer, Valerio Basile, Franco Sansonetti, Antonio Uva, and Davide Bernardi. 2025. PERSEVAL: A Framework for Perspectivist Classification Evaluation. In Proceedings of the 2025 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 22345–22370, Suzhou, China. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
PERSEVAL: A Framework for Perspectivist Classification Evaluation (Lo et al., EMNLP 2025)
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