Equitable Evaluation via Elicitation
Organizations: Harvard University · Northeastern University · University of Maryland · Rutgers University
Abstract
Individuals with similar qualifications and skills may vary in their demeanor, or outward manner: some tend toward self-promotion while others are modest to the point of omitting crucial information. Comparing the self-descriptions of equally qualified job-seekers with different self-presentation styles is therefore problematic. We build an interactive AI for skill elicitation that provides accurate determination of skills while simultaneously allowing individuals to speak in their own voice. Such a system can be deployed, for example, when a new user joins a professional networking platform, or when matching employees to needs during a company reorganization. To obtain sufficient training data, we train an LLM to act as synthetic humans. Elicitation mitigates endogenous bias arising from individuals' own self-reports. To address systematic model bias we enforce a mathematically rigorous notion of equitability ensuring that the covariance between self-presentation manner and skill evaluation error is small.
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Appendix figures & tables4 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
| Variable | Type | Description |
|---|---|---|
| applicant ID/index | ||
| Ground truth, 1 if the applicant has the skill, 0 otherwise | ||
| Estimate of value gives probability of being 1 | ||
| Response simulator | ||
| question selector, produces a learned distributions over questions | ||
| Set of questions, (pre-defined) |
| Rank | Skill |
|---|---|
| 1 | Customer Service |
| 2 | Microsoft Office |
| 3 | Leadership |
| 4 | Management |
| 5 | Microsoft Excel |
| 6 | Public Speaking |
| Field | Content |
|---|---|
| Example 1 | |
| Prompt ID | 891004434 |
| Full Name | Laura Moore |
| Gender | female |
| Industry | Legal |
| Job Title | Administrative Coordinator |
Algorithmic Fairness
Algorithmic fairness studies how automated decisions distribute errors, opportunities, and harms across groups, and how to measure and reduce disparities.
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