• DOI:10.48550/arXiv.2205.05989
• Corpus ID: 248722181

AiSocrates: Towards Answering Ethical Quandary Questions

@article{Bang2022AiSocratesTA,
  title={AiSocrates: Towards Answering Ethical Quandary Questions},
  author={Yejin Bang and Nayeon Lee and Tiezheng Yu and Leila Khalatbari and Yan Xu and Dan Su and Elham J. Barezi and Andrea Madotto and Hayden Kee and Pascale Fung},
  journal={ArXiv},
  year={2022},
  volume={abs/2205.05989}
}

• Yejin Bang, Nayeon Lee, +7 authors Pascale Fung
• Published 12 May 2022
• Computer Science
• ArXiv

Considerable advancements have been made in various NLP tasks based on the impressive power of large pre-trained language models (LLMs). These results have inspired ef-forts to understand the limits of LLMs so as to evaluate how far we are from achieving human level general natural language understanding. In this work, we challenge the capability of LLMs with the new task of E THICAL Q UANDARY G ENERATIVE Q UES TION A NSWERING . Ethical quandary questions are more challenging to address because multiple conflicting answers may exist to a single quandary. We propose a system, A I S OCRATES , that provides an answer with a deliberative exchange of different perspectives to an ethical quandary, in the approach of Socratic philosophy, instead of providing a closed answer like an oracle. A I S OCRATES searches for different ethical principles applicable to the ethical quandary and generates an answer conditioned on the chosen principles through prompt-based few-shot learning. We also address safety concerns by providing a human controllability option in choosing ethical principles. We show that A I S OCRATES generates promising answers to ethical quandary questions with multiple perspectives, 6.92% more often than answers written by human philosophers by one measure, but the system still needs improvement to match the coherence of human philosophers fully. We argue that A I S OCRATES is a promising step toward developing an NLP system that incorporates human values explicitly by prompt instructions. We are releasing the code for research purposes.