BASIL: Bayesian Assessment of Sycophancy in LLMs
Katherine Atwell, Pedram Heydari, Anthony Sicilia, and Malihe Alikhani. ArXiv, 2025.
News
- 08.23.25: Our work, BASIL: Bayesian Assessment of Sycophancy in LLMs, was published at ArXiv
- 07.31.25: I am co-organizing the fourth NLP for Positive Impact Workshop, co-located at ACL 2025!
- 07.27.25: Our work, Measuring Bias and Agreement in Large Language Model Presupposition Judgments, was published at ACL Findings 2024
- 07.27.25: Our work, Contextual ASR Error Handling with LLMs Augmentation for Goal-Oriented Conversational AI, was published at COLING Industry Track 2025
- 06.25.25: My advisor, Malihe Alikhani, spoke with a Wall Street Journal reporter about our lab's work on AI sycophancy; see the article here!
- 11.12.24: Our work, Studying and Mitigating Biases in Sign Language Understanding Models, was published at EMNLP 2024
- 06.26.24: Our work, The Importance of Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing, was published at
- 06.16.24: Our work, Generating Signed Language Instructions in Large-Scale Dialogue Systems, was published at NAACL 2024
About
Welcome! I am a final-year PhD candidate in Computer Science at Northeastern University, conducting research with Malihe Alikhani. I am passionate about using NLP tools for good, and my research focuses on developing responsible and fair AI tools using insights from linguistics and social sciences. I have published at venues including ACL, NAACL, EACL, SIGDIAL, COLING, and COGSCI, and won a best paper award for our work at UAI 2022. I was also part of a university team that placed third in the Amazon Alexa Prize Taskbot Competition!
In my free time, I enjoy bouldering, playing the piano, singing (catch our concerts at Cambridge Chamber Singers!), working out, and spending time outdoors!
I’m currently on the job market, so please feel free to reach out if you know of any opportunities that may be a good fit!
Projects
I believe that NLP is fundamentally interdisciplinary, and my research reflects this. I develop computational frameworks for understanding linguistic and social phenomena, and apply these frameworks to develop fair and responsible AI systems. Therefore, most of my current or past projects fall into one or more of the following categories: Discourse and Pragmatics, Computational Social Science, and Responsible and Accessible AI. Here are some examples of current and past projects:
Evaluating the impacts of sycophancy in LLMs using insights from behavioral economics
Drawing from insights in behavioral economics and rational decision theory, we are exploring how to model the ways in which AI systems navigate uncertainty when introduced to new information. This information may include the user’s opinion or involvement in a particular scenario, both of which have been shown to induce sycophancy (excessively flattering or ingratiating behavior) in LLMs. In this project, we study how sycophancy can impact LLMs’ beliefs and uncertainty estimations given new information, and the extent to which LLMs are Bayesian-rational when sycophancy is induced.
Recent Publications
Measuring Bias and Agreement in Large Language Model Presupposition Judgments
Katherine Atwell, Mandy Simons and Malihe Alikhani. In the Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2025, 2025.
Contextual ASR Error Handling with LLMs Augmentation for Goal-Oriented Conversational AI
Yuya Asano, Sabit Hassan, Paras Sharma, Anthony B. Sicilia, Katherine Atwell, Diane Litman, and Malihe Alikhani. In the Proceedings of the 31st International Conference on Computational Linguistics: Industry Track, 2025.
Studying and Mitigating Biases in Sign Language Understanding Models
Katherine Atwell, Danielle Bragg, and Malihe Alikhani. In the Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, 2024.
The Importance of Including Signed Languages in Natural Language Processing
Katherine Atwell, Mandy Simons and Malihe Alikhani. Sign Language Machine Translation, 2024.
Generating Signed Language Instructions in Large-Scale Dialogue Systems
Mert Inan, Katherine Atwell, Anthony Sicilia, Lorna Quandt, and Malihe Alikhani. In the Proceedings of the 2024 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies (Volume 6: Industry Track), 2024.
Katherine Atwell, Mert Inan, Anthony B. Sicilia, Malihe Alikhani. In the Proceedings of the 2024 Joint International Conference on Computational Linguistics, Language Resources and Evaluation, 2024.
Multilingual Content Moderation: A Case Study on Reddit
Meng Ye, Karan Sikka, Katherine Atwell, Sabit Hassan, Ajay Divakaran, and Malihe Alikhani. In the proceedings of Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, 2023.