Communities

Writing
Writing
Codidact Meta
Codidact Meta
The Great Outdoors
The Great Outdoors
Photography & Video
Photography & Video
Scientific Speculation
Scientific Speculation
Cooking
Cooking
Electrical Engineering
Electrical Engineering
Judaism
Judaism
Languages & Linguistics
Languages & Linguistics
Software Development
Software Development
Mathematics
Mathematics
Christianity
Christianity
Code Golf
Code Golf
Music
Music
Physics
Physics
Linux Systems
Linux Systems
Power Users
Power Users
Tabletop RPGs
Tabletop RPGs
Community Proposals
Community Proposals
tag:snake search within a tag
answers:0 unanswered questions
user:xxxx search by author id
score:0.5 posts with 0.5+ score
"snake oil" exact phrase
votes:4 posts with 4+ votes
created:<1w created < 1 week ago
post_type:xxxx type of post
Search help
Notifications
Mark all as read See all your notifications »
Q&A

Post History

66%
+2 −0
Q&A What underlying principle is at play for how objective or subjective a natural language instruction is?

The question alludes to at least three correlated, but quite distinct dimensions. Objectivity/subjectivity Room for model's creativity (information theoretical) Crispness of the boundary betwe...

posted 10mo ago by Jirka Hanika‭

Answer
#1: Initial revision by user avatar Jirka Hanika‭ · 2024-02-27T15:33:17Z (10 months ago)
The question alludes to at least three correlated, but quite distinct dimensions.

* Objectivity/subjectivity
* Room for model's creativity (information theoretical)
* Crispness of the boundary between "correct" and "incorrect" productions.

To define them, introduce an additional agent, perhaps a human, acting as a **referee**.  The referee observes of the interaction between the prompt and the model's production and eventually marks the model's performance with a percentage of "correctness": 0 for an incorrect production, 100 for a correct production.  

**Crispness** of correctness - Crisp (black-and-white) prompts will mostly solicit productions scored **0 or 100**.  Fuzzy (gray area) prompts will mostly solicit productions scored **somewhere in between**.  There's no single most popular measure of fuzziness, but you could pick one from literature or invent your own.

**Room for creativity** - For a crisp prompt, define this as the logarithm of the **number** of 100% correct productions for a given prompt.  For a fuzzy prompt, you might need something like weighted entropy and/or a "minimum correctness cut-off threshold".

**Objectivity/subjectivity** seems to relate to a **population** of referees.  An objective prompt will solicit correlated marks from different referees, whereas for a subjective prompt, it's conceivable that different referees will prefer different productions.  Ultimately, you can measure that correlation.  But the concept is population-dependent.

It's not unusual to see one of those dimensions used as a proxy for another.  If the competitors are people and not language models, and you need a very high degree of objectivity, it often helps if all the prompts are crisp and the room for creativity is zero - that is, if each prompt has exactly one correct production.  Such limitations don't deliver any objectivity in themselves, but they make it easier to evaluate objectivity using a population of assessors.

I'm afraid that none of those three dimensions are of primarily linguistic nature, or at least I cannot quite see the connection (and a better answer might be able to point one out).