Marlene Lutz

Very honored to be one out of seven outstanding papers at this years' EMNLP :)

Huge thanks to my amazing collaborators @fatemehc.bsky.social @anamarasovic.bsky.social @boknilev.bsky.social , this would not have been possible without them!

👋🏼 I'm at #EMNLP2025 presenting "The Prompt Makes the Person(a): A Systematic Evaluation of Sociodemographic Persona Prompting for LLMs"

🕑 Thu. Nov 6, 12:30 - 13:30
📍 Findings Session 2, Hall C3

The Prompt Makes the Person(a): A Systematic Evaluation of Sociodemographic Persona Prompting for Large Language Models Persona prompting is increasingly used in large language models (LLMs) to simulate views of various sociodemographic groups. However, how a persona prompt is formulated can significantly affect outcom...

📄 Paper: arxiv.org/abs/2507.16076

Come chat with me about this at #EMNLP2025!

Huge thanks to my amazing collaborators
@indiiigo.bsky.social, @wanlo.bsky.social, @ Elisa Rogers, and @mstrohm.bsky.social!
7/7

🌍 When simulating Hispanic personas, several LLMs spontaneously switched to Spanish — a pattern not seen for other groups.

This is the first systematic evidence of language-switching bias in persona prompting!
6/7

📉 Bigger ≠ better.

Across all tasks and measures, larger models performed worse than smaller ones—sometimes even showing lower opinion alignment than a random baseline.
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📊Interview-style prompting also significantly improves alignment with real-world survey data!
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💡The good news: Interview-style prompting (Q&A format) and name-based priming (using culturally associated names instead of explicit labels) consistently:
✅ Reduces stereotyping
✅ Improves diversity of responses
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⚖️LLMs still fall short when simulating marginalized identities.

Simulations of nonbinary, Hispanic, and Middle Eastern personas are more stereotyped and less diverse than those of other groups.
2/7

🚨New paper alert🚨

🤔 Ever wondered how the way you write a persona prompt affects how well an LLM simulates people?

In our #EMNLP2025 paper, we find that using interview-style persona prompts makes LLM social simulations less biased and more aligned with human opinions.
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👋 #ACL2025NLP 🇦🇹 @marlutz.bsky.social and I are presenting our poster on demographic representativeness of LLMs today!

🕦 10:30-12:00
📍 Hall X5 (board 1 or 14 according to different sources 🧐)

Here’s the paper on ACL anthology: aclanthology.org/2025.finding...

Drop by!

GitHub - Indiiigo/LLM_rep_review: Systematic Review of the Demographic Representativeness of LLMs Systematic Review of the Demographic Representativeness of LLMs - Indiiigo/LLM_rep_review

Joint work w/ @marlutz.bsky.social, Elisa Rogers, @dgarcia.eu and @mstrohm.bsky.social

You can find our code and annotated dataset of papers here: github.com/Indiiigo/LLM...

We annotated way more things, e.g., LLM used, response format, so please check it out!

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