University of Wisconsin–Madison

Tag: Jacob Thebault-Spieker

Is Your Chatbot a Tourist or a Townie? Quantifying Geographic and Localness Disparities in LLM Representations of Place

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Proceedings of the ACM Human-Computer Interaction (2026) Authors: Zihan Gao and Jacob Thebault-Spieker Abstract: People are increasingly using Large Language Models (LLMs) for a sense of “localness,” yet their ability to accurately and equitably represent local knowledge remains unexamined. To investigate this, we conducted a large-scale evaluation using a benchmark of over 12,000 question-answer pairs spanning …

Diverse Perspectives Can Mitigate Political Bias in Crowdsourced Content Moderation

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Proceedings of the 2023 ACM Conference on Fairness, Accountability, and Transparency (2023). Authors: Jacob Thebault-Spieker, Sukrit Venkatagiri, Naomi Mine, and Kurt Luther Abstract: In recent years, social media companies have grappled with defining and enforcing content moderation policies surrounding political content on their platforms, due in part to concerns about political bias, disinformation, and polarization. These …

A Turn to Assets in Community-Based Computing Research: Tradeoffs, Deficits, and Neoliberalism in Technological Development

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Proceedings of the ACM on Human-Computer Interaction (2024) Authors: Jean Hardy and Jacob Thebault-Spieker Abstract: CSCW and HCI scholars are increasingly adopting asset-based approaches to community-based social computing research. Emerging from asset-based community development (ABCD), an approach to community and economic development research and practice that emerged in the 1990s, advocates for asset-based approaches argue that …