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Uncertainty in Natural Language Processing: Sources, Quantification, and Applications

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arxiv 2306.04459 v1 pith:PERNGABW submitted 2023-06-05 cs.CL

Uncertainty in Natural Language Processing: Sources, Quantification, and Applications

classification cs.CL
keywords uncertaintyfieldlanguagenaturalnetworksneuralreviewapplications
verification ladder T0 review T1 audit T2 compute T3 formal T4 reserved
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As a main field of artificial intelligence, natural language processing (NLP) has achieved remarkable success via deep neural networks. Plenty of NLP tasks have been addressed in a unified manner, with various tasks being associated with each other through sharing the same paradigm. However, neural networks are black boxes and rely on probability computation. Making mistakes is inevitable. Therefore, estimating the reliability and trustworthiness (in other words, uncertainty) of neural networks becomes a key research direction, which plays a crucial role in reducing models' risks and making better decisions. Therefore, in this survey, we provide a comprehensive review of uncertainty-relevant works in the NLP field. Considering the data and paradigms characteristics, we first categorize the sources of uncertainty in natural language into three types, including input, system, and output. Then, we systemically review uncertainty quantification approaches and the main applications. Finally, we discuss the challenges of uncertainty estimation in NLP and discuss potential future directions, taking into account recent trends in the field. Though there have been a few surveys about uncertainty estimation, our work is the first to review uncertainty from the NLP perspective.

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Cited by 3 Pith papers

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  1. Walking Through Uncertainty: An Empirical Study of Uncertainty Estimation for Audio-Aware Large Language Models

    eess.AS 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 7.0

    Semantic-level and verification-based uncertainty methods outperform token-level baselines for audio reasoning in ALLMs, but their relative performance on hallucination and unanswerable-question benchmarks is model- a...

  2. When Calibration Rankings Reverse: Accuracy-Controlled Evaluation for Fair Comparison of LLMs

    cs.CL 2026-06 unverdicted novelty 6.0

    Global calibration metrics like ECE are confounded by accuracy; the proposed ACE framework with three accuracy-controlled views shows many prior calibration advantages weaken or reverse.

  3. When Should a Language Model Trust Itself? Same-Model Self-Verification as a Conditional Confidence Signal

    cs.CL 2026-04 unverdicted novelty 4.0

    Self-verification acts as a conditional confidence signal for language models rather than a reliable general-purpose uncertainty estimator.