OccuQuest: Mitigating Occupational Bias for Inclusive Large Language Models

Abstract

The emergence of large language models (LLMs) has revolutionized natural language processing tasks. However, existing instruction-tuning datasets suffer from occupational bias: the majority of data relates to only a few occupations, which hampers the instruction-tuned LLMs to generate helpful responses to professional queries from practitioners in specific fields. To mitigate this issue and promote occupation-inclusive LLMs, we create an instruction-tuning dataset named OccuQuest, which contains 110,000+ prompt-completion pairs and 30,000+ dialogues covering over 1,000 occupations in 26 occupational categories. We systematically request ChatGPT, organizing queries hierarchically based on Occupation, Responsibility, Topic, and Question, to ensure a comprehensive coverage of occupational specialty inquiries. By comparing with three commonly used datasets (Dolly, ShareGPT, and WizardLM), we observe that OccuQuest exhibits a more balanced distribution across occupations. Furthermore, we assemble three test sets for comprehensive evaluation, an occu-test set covering 25 occupational categories, an estate set focusing on real estate, and an occu-quora set containing real-world questions from Quora. We then fine-tune LLaMA on OccuQuest to obtain OccuLLaMA, which significantly outperforms state-of-the-art LLaMA variants (Vicuna, Tulu, and WizardLM) on professional questions in GPT-4 and human evaluations. Notably, on the occu-quora set, OccuLLaMA reaches a high win rate of 86.4\% against WizardLM.