Sometimes the Model doth Preach: Quantifying Religious Bias in Open LLMs through Demographic Analysis in Asian Nations

Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of generating opinions and propagating bias unknowingly, originating from unrepresentative and non-diverse data collection. Prior research has analysed these opinions with respect to the West, particularly the United States. However, insights thus produced may not be generalized in non-Western populations. With the widespread usage of LLM systems by users across several different walks of life, the cultural sensitivity of each generated output is of crucial interest. Our work proposes a novel method that quantitatively analyzes the opinions generated by LLMs, improving on previous work with regards to extracting the social demographics of the models. Our method measures the distance from an LLM's response to survey respondents, through Hamming Distance, to infer the demographic characteristics reflected in the model's outputs. We evaluate modern, open LLMs such as Llama and Mistral on surveys conducted in various global south countries, with a focus on India and other Asian nations, specifically assessing the model's performance on surveys related to religious tolerance and identity. Our analysis reveals that most open LLMs match a single homogeneous profile, varying across different countries/territories, which in turn raises questions about the risks of LLMs promoting a hegemonic worldview, and undermining perspectives of different minorities. Our framework may also be useful for future research investigating the complex intersection between training data, model architecture, and the resulting biases reflected in LLM outputs, particularly concerning sensitive topics like religious tolerance and identity.

Through the Prism of Culture: Evaluating LLMs' Understanding of Indian Subcultures and Traditions

Large Language Models (LLMs) have shown remarkable advancements but also raise concerns about cultural bias, often reflecting dominant narratives at the expense of under-represented subcultures. In this study, we evaluate the capacity of LLMs to recognize and accurately respond to the Little Traditions within Indian society, encompassing localized cultural practices and subcultures such as caste, kinship, marriage, and religion. Through a series of case studies, we assess whether LLMs can balance the interplay between dominant Great Traditions and localized Little Traditions. We explore various prompting strategies and further investigate whether using prompts in regional languages enhances the models cultural sensitivity and response quality. Our findings reveal that while LLMs demonstrate an ability to articulate cultural nuances, they often struggle to apply this understanding in practical, context-specific scenarios. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study to analyze LLMs engagement with Indian subcultures, offering critical insights into the challenges of embedding cultural diversity in AI systems.

Sponsored is the New Organic: Implications of Sponsored Results on Quality of Search Results in the Amazon Marketplace

Interleaving sponsored results (advertisements) amongst organic results on search engine result pages (SERP) has become a common practice across multiple digital platforms. Advertisements have catered to consumer satisfaction and fostered competition in digital public spaces; making them an appealing gateway for businesses to reach their consumers. However, especially in the context of digital marketplaces, due to the competitive nature of the sponsored results with the organic ones, multiple unwanted repercussions have surfaced affecting different stakeholders. From the consumers' perspective the sponsored ads/results may cause degradation of search quality and nudge consumers to potentially irrelevant and costlier products. The sponsored ads may also affect the level playing field of the competition in the marketplaces among sellers. To understand and unravel these potential concerns, we analyse the Amazon digital marketplace in four different countries by simulating 4,800 search operations. Our analyses over SERPs consisting 2M organic and 638K sponsored results show items with poor organic ranks (beyond 100th position) appear as sponsored results even before the top organic results on the first page of Amazon SERP. Moreover, we also observe that in majority of the cases, these top sponsored results are costlier and are of poorer quality than the top organic results. We believe these observations can motivate researchers for further deliberation to bring in more transparency and guard rails in the advertising practices followed in digital marketplaces.

Investigating Nudges toward Related Sellers on E-commerce Marketplaces: A Case Study on Amazon

E-commerce marketplaces provide business opportunities to millions of sellers worldwide. Some of these sellers have special relationships with the marketplace by virtue of using their subsidiary services (e.g., fulfillment and/or shipping services provided by the marketplace) -- we refer to such sellers collectively as Related Sellers. When multiple sellers offer to sell the same product, the marketplace helps a customer in selecting an offer (by a seller) through (a) a default offer selection algorithm, (b) showing features about each of the offers and the corresponding sellers (price, seller performance metrics, seller's number of ratings etc.), and (c) finally evaluating the sellers along these features. In this paper, we perform an end-to-end investigation into how the above apparatus can nudge customers toward the Related Sellers on Amazon's four different marketplaces in India, USA, Germany and France. We find that given explicit choices, customers' preferred offers and algorithmically selected offers can be significantly different. We highlight that Amazon is adopting different performance metric evaluation policies for different sellers, potentially benefiting Related Sellers. For instance, such policies result in notable discrepancy between the actual performance metric and the presented performance metric of Related Sellers. We further observe that among the seller-centric features visible to customers, sellers' number of ratings influences their decisions the most, yet it may not reflect the true quality of service by the seller, rather reflecting the scale at which the seller operates, thereby implicitly steering customers toward larger Related Sellers. Moreover, when customers are shown the rectified metrics for the different sellers, their preference toward Related Sellers is almost halved.

LaMSUM: A Novel Framework for Extractive Summarization of User Generated Content using LLMs

Large Language Models (LLMs) have demonstrated impressive performance across a wide range of NLP tasks, including summarization. Inherently LLMs produce abstractive summaries, and the task of achieving extractive summaries through LLMs still remains largely unexplored. To bridge this gap, in this work, we propose a novel framework LaMSUM to generate extractive summaries through LLMs for large user-generated text by leveraging voting algorithms. Our evaluation on three popular open-source LLMs (Llama 3, Mixtral and Gemini) reveal that the LaMSUM outperforms state-of-the-art extractive summarization methods. We further attempt to provide the rationale behind the output summary produced by LLMs. Overall, this is one of the early attempts to achieve extractive summarization for large user-generated text by utilizing LLMs, and likely to generate further interest in the community.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Legal Data Mining

Despite the availability of vast amounts of data, legal data is often unstructured, making it difficult even for law practitioners to ingest and comprehend the same. It is important to organise the legal information in a way that is useful for practitioners and downstream automation tasks. The word ontology was used by Greek philosophers to discuss concepts of existence, being, becoming and reality. Today, scientists use this term to describe the relation between concepts, data, and entities. A great example for a working ontology was developed by Dhani and Bhatt. This ontology deals with Indian court cases on intellectual property rights (IPR) The future of legal ontologies is likely to be handled by computer experts and legal experts alike.

Antitrust, Amazon, and Algorithmic Auditing

In digital markets, antitrust law and special regulations aim to ensure that markets remain competitive despite the dominating role that digital platforms play today in everyone's life. Unlike traditional markets, market participant behavior is easily observable in these markets. We present a series of empirical investigations into the extent to which Amazon engages in practices that are typically described as self-preferencing. We discuss how the computer science tools used in this paper can be used in a regulatory environment that is based on algorithmic auditing and requires regulating digital markets at scale.

Few-Shot Fairness: Unveiling LLM's Potential for Fairness-Aware Classification

Employing Large Language Models (LLM) in various downstream applications such as classification is crucial, especially for smaller companies lacking the expertise and resources required for fine-tuning a model. Fairness in LLMs helps ensure inclusivity, equal representation based on factors such as race, gender and promotes responsible AI deployment. As the use of LLMs has become increasingly prevalent, it is essential to assess whether LLMs can generate fair outcomes when subjected to considerations of fairness. In this study, we introduce a framework outlining fairness regulations aligned with various fairness definitions, with each definition being modulated by varying degrees of abstraction. We explore the configuration for in-context learning and the procedure for selecting in-context demonstrations using RAG, while incorporating fairness rules into the process. Experiments conducted with different LLMs indicate that GPT-4 delivers superior results in terms of both accuracy and fairness compared to other models. This work is one of the early attempts to achieve fairness in prediction tasks by utilizing LLMs through in-context learning.

Towards Fairness in Online Service with k Servers and its Application on Fair Food Delivery

The k-SERVER problem is one of the most prominent problems in online algorithms with several variants and extensions. However, simplifying assumptions like instantaneous server movements and zero service time has hitherto limited its applicability to real-world problems. In this paper, we introduce a realistic generalization of k-SERVER without such assumptions - the k-FOOD problem, where requests with source-destination locations and an associated pickup time window arrive in an online fashion, and each has to be served by exactly one of the available k servers. The k-FOOD problem offers the versatility to model a variety of real-world use cases such as food delivery, ride sharing, and quick commerce. Moreover, motivated by the need for fairness in online platforms, we introduce the FAIR k-FOOD problem with the max-min objective. We establish that both k-FOOD and FAIR k-FOOD problems are strongly NP-hard and develop an optimal offline algorithm that arises naturally from a time-expanded flow network. Subsequently, we propose an online algorithm DOC4FOOD involving virtual movements of servers to the nearest request location. Experiments on a real-world food-delivery dataset, alongside synthetic datasets, establish the efficacy of the proposed algorithm against state-of-the-art fair food delivery algorithms.

Gigs with Guarantees: Achieving Fair Wage for Food Delivery Workers

With the increasing popularity of food delivery platforms, it has become pertinent to look into the working conditions of the 'gig' workers in these platforms, especially providing them fair wages, reasonable working hours, and transparency on work availability. However, any solution to these problems must not degrade customer experience and be cost-effective to ensure that platforms are willing to adopt them. We propose WORK4FOOD, which provides income guarantees to delivery agents, while minimizing platform costs and ensuring customer satisfaction. WORK4FOOD ensures that the income guarantees are met in such a way that it does not lead to increased working hours or degrade environmental impact. To incorporate these objectives, WORK4FOOD balances supply and demand by controlling the number of agents in the system and providing dynamic payment guarantees to agents based on factors such as agent location, ratings, etc. We evaluate WORK4FOOD on a real-world dataset from a leading food delivery platform and establish its advantages over the state of the art in terms of the multi-dimensional objectives at hand.