Should We Respect LLMs? A Cross-Lingual Study on the Influence of Prompt Politeness on LLM Performance
Authors:
Preprint
Abstract
We investigate the impact of politeness levels in prompts on the performance of large language models (LLMs). Polite language in human communications often garners more compliance and effectiveness, while rudeness can cause aversion, impacting response quality. We consider that LLMs mirror human communication traits, suggesting they align with human cultural norms. We assess the impact of politeness in prompts on LLMs across English, Chinese, and Japanese tasks. We observed that impolite prompts often result in poor performance, but overly polite language does not guarantee better outcomes. The best politeness level is different according to the language. This phenomenon suggests that LLMs not only reflect human behavior but are also influenced by language, particularly in different cultural contexts. Our findings highlight the need to factor in politeness for cross-cultural natural language processing and LLM usage.Keywords
All Related Versions
This publication has 12 references indexed in Scilit:
- Biases in Large Language Models: Origins, Inventory, and DiscussionJournal of Data and Information Quality, 2023
- Assessing Cross-Cultural Alignment between ChatGPT and Human Societies: An Empirical Study2023
- Gender Bias in BERT - Measuring and Analysing Biases through Sentiment Rating in a Realistic Downstream Classification Task2022
- Measuring Fairness with Biased Rulers: A Comparative Study on Bias Metrics for Pre-trained Language Models2022
- Gender Bias in Masked Language Models for Multiple Languages2022
- Authentic self-expression on social media is associated with greater subjective well-beingNature Communications, 2020
- AutoPrompt: Eliciting Knowledge from Language Models with Automatically Generated Prompts2020
- CrowS-Pairs: A Challenge Dataset for Measuring Social Biases in Masked Language Models2020
- POLITENESS AS A UNIVERSAL VARIABLE IN CROSS‐CULTURAL MANAGERIAL COMMUNICATIONThe International Journal of Organizational Analysis, 1996
- Politeness phenomena in modern ChineseJournal of Pragmatics, 1990