2024/09/17 by Khaled Alnuaimi, AlNuaimi, Khaled, Gautier Marti +9 · 2 citations
Computer Science · Decision Sciences · Social Sciences · #Computation and Language (cs.CL) #Computational and Text Analysis Methods #FOS: Computer and information sciences #Topic Modeling #demographic modeling and climate adaptation
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2409.11491
openalex publication_date 2024/09/17 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
Enriching datasets with demographic information, such as gender, race, and age from names, is a critical task in fields like healthcare, public policy, and social sciences. Such demographic insights allow for more precise and effective engagement with target populations. Despite previous efforts employing hidden Markov models and recurrent neural networks to predict demographics from names, significant limitations persist: the lack of large-scale, well-curated, unbiased, publicly available datasets, and the lack of an approach robust across datasets. This scarcity has hindered the development of traditional supervised learning approaches. In this paper, we demonstrate that the zero-shot capabilities of Large Language Models (LLMs) can perform as well as, if not better than, bespoke models trained on specialized data. We apply these LLMs to a variety of datasets, including a real-life, unlabelled dataset of licensed financial professionals in Hong Kong, and critically assess the inherent demographic biases in these models. Our work not only advances the state-of-the-art in demographic enrichment but also opens avenues for future research in mitigating biases in LLMs.