Calibrating Expressions of Certainty
Peiqi Wang Barbara D. Lam Yingcheng Liu Ameneh Asgari-Targhi Rameswar Panda William M Wells Tina Kapur Polina Golland
We present a novel approach to calibrating linguistic expressions of certainty, e.g., "Maybe" and "Likely". Unlike prior work that assigns a single score to each certainty phrase, we model uncertainty as distributions over the simplex to capture their semantics more accurately. To accommodate this new representation of certainty, we generalize existing measures of miscalibration and introduce a novel post-hoc calibration method. Leveraging these tools, we analyze the calibration of both humans (e.g., radiologists) and computational models (e.g., language models) and provide interpretable suggestions to improve their calibration.
calibration, uncertainty, optimal transport, language models
We assess and improve the calibration of both humans and language models that communicate their confidence using linguistic expressions of certainty