@inproceedings{zhou-etal-2025-modeling,
    title = "Modeling Subjectivity in Cognitive Appraisal with Language Models",
    author = "Zhou, Yuxiang  and
      Xu, Hainiu  and
      Ong, Desmond  and
      Liakata, Maria  and
      Slovak, Petr  and
      He, Yulan",
    editor = "Christodoulopoulos, Christos  and
      Chakraborty, Tanmoy  and
      Rose, Carolyn  and
      Peng, Violet",
    booktitle = "Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2025",
    month = nov,
    year = "2025",
    address = "Suzhou, China",
    publisher = "Association for Computational Linguistics",
    url = "https://preview.aclanthology.org/name-variant-enfa-fane/2025.findings-emnlp.744/",
    doi = "10.18653/v1/2025.findings-emnlp.744",
    pages = "13811--13833",
    ISBN = "979-8-89176-335-7",
    abstract = "As the utilization of language models in interdisciplinary, human-centered studies grow, expectations of their capabilities continue to evolve. Beyond excelling at conventional tasks, models are now expected to perform well on user-centric measurements involving confidence and human (dis)agreement- factors that reflect subjective preferences. While modeling subjectivity plays an essential role in cognitive science and has been extensively studied, its investigation at the intersection with NLP remains under-explored. In light of this gap, we explore how language models can quantify subjectivity in cognitive appraisal by conducting comprehensive experiments and analyses with both fine-tuned models and prompt-based large language models (LLMs). Our quantitative and qualitative results demonstrate that personality traits and demographic information are critical for measuring subjectivity, yet existing post-hoc calibration methods often fail to achieve satisfactory performance. Furthermore, our in-depth analysis provides valuable insights to guide future research at the intersection of NLP and cognitive science."
}