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Pre-trained language models have shown impressive abilities of understanding and generating natural languages. However, they typically inherit undesired human-like bias and stereotypes from training data, which raises concerns about putting these models into use in real-world scenarios. Although prior research has proposed to reduce bias using different fairness objectives, they usually fail to capture different representations of bias and, therefore, struggle with fully debiasing models. In this work, we introduce a multi-objective probability alignment approach to overcome current challenges by incorporating multiple debiasing losses to locate and penalize bias in different forms. Compared to existing methods, our proposed method can more effectively and comprehensively reduce stereotypical bias, and maintains the language ability of pre-trained models at the same time. Besides, we adopt prefix-tuning to optimize fairness objectives, and results show that it can achieve better bias removal than full fine-tuning while requiring much fewer computational resources. Our code and data are available at https://github.com/Ewanwong/debias_NLG.

ACL 2024

A Parameter-Efficient Multi-Objective Approach to Mitigate Stereotypical Bias in Language Models

gender bias

workshop paper

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The 62nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL 2024) will take place in Bangkok, Thailand from August 11th to 16th, 2024. More information will be announced soon.

Pre-trained language models (PLMs) have achieved success in various of natural language processing (NLP) tasks. However, PLMs also introduce some disquieting safety problems, such as gender bias. Gender bias is an extremely complex issue, because different individuals may hold disparate opinions on whether the same sentence expresses harmful bias, especially those seemingly neutral or positive. This paper first defines the concept of contextualized gender bias (CGB), which makes it easy to measure implicit gender bias in both PLMs and annotators. We then construct CGBDataset, which contains 20k natural sentences with gendered words, from Chinese news. Similar to the task of masked language models, gendered words are masked for PLMs and annotators to judge whether a male word or a female word is more suitable. Then, we introduce CGBFrame to measure the gender bias of annotators. By comparing the results measured by PLMs and annotators, we find that though there are differences on the choices made by PLMs and annotators, they show significant consistency in general.

Do PLMs and Annotators Share the Same Gender Bias? Definition, Dataset, and Framework of Contextualized Gender Bias

Gender Stereotypes refer to the widely held beliefs and assumptions about the typical traits, behaviours, and roles associated with a collective group of individuals of a particular gender in society. These typical beliefs about how people of a particular gender are described in text can cause harmful effects to individuals leading to unfair treatment. In this research, the aim is to identify the words and language constructs that can influence a text to be considered a gender stereotype. To do so, a transformer model with attention is fine-tuned for gender stereotype detection. Thereafter, words/language constructs used for the model's decision are identified using a combined use of attention- and SHAP (SHapley Additive exPlanations)-based explainable approaches. Results show that adjectives and verbs were highly influential in predicting gender stereotypes. Furthermore, applying sentiment analysis showed that words describing male gender stereotypes were more positive than those used for female gender stereotypes.

An Explainable Approach to Understanding Gender Stereotype Text

This study examines the fairness of human- and AI-generated summaries of student reflections in university STEM classes, focusing on potential gender biases. Using topic modeling, we first identify topics that are more prevalent in reflections from female students and others that are more common among male students. We then analyze whether human and AI-generated summaries reflect the concerns of students of any particular gender over others. Our analysis reveals that though human-generated and extractive AI summarization techniques do not show a clear bias, abstractive AI-generated summaries exhibit a bias towards male students. Pedagogical themes are over-represented from male reflections in these summaries, while concept-specific topics are under-represented from female reflections. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of AI-generated bias in educational contexts, highlighting the need for future work on mitigating these biases.

A Fairness Analysis of Human and AI-Generated Student Reflection Summaries

Instructional texts for different audience groups can help to address specific needs, but at the same time run the risk of perpetrating biases. In this paper, we extend previous findings on disparate social norms and subtle stereotypes in wikiHow in two directions: We explore the use of fine-tuned language models to determine how audience-specific instructional texts can be distinguished and we transfer the methodology to another language, Italian, to identify cross-linguistic patterns. We find that language models mostly rely on group terms, gender markings, and attributes reinforcing stereotypes.

On Shortcuts and Biases: How Finetuned Language Models Distinguish Audience-Specific Instructions in Italian and English

This paper studies gender bias in machine translation through the lens of Large Language Models (LLMs). Four widely-used test sets are employed to benchmark various base LLMs, comparing their translation quality and gender bias against state-of-the-art Neural Machine Translation (NMT) models for English to Catalan (En → Ca) and English to Spanish (En → Es) translation directions. Our findings reveal pervasive gender bias across all models, with base LLMs exhibiting a higher degree of bias compared to NMT models.

To combat this bias, we explore prompting engineering techniques applied to an instruction-tuned LLM. We identify a prompt structure that significantly reduces gender bias by up to 12% on the WinoMT evaluation dataset compared to more straightforward prompts. These results significantly reduce the gender bias accuracy gap between LLMs and traditional NMT systems.

The power of Prompts: Evaluating and Mitigating Gender Bias in MT with LLMs

Authorship Profiling (AP) aims to predict the demographic attributes (such as gender and age) of authors based on their writing styles. Ever-improving models mean that this task is gaining interest and application possibilities. However, with greater use also comes the risk that authors are misclassified more frequently, and it remains unclear to what extent the better models can capture the bias and who is affected by the models' mistakes. In this paper, we investigate three established datasets for AP as well as classical and neural classifiers for this task. Our analyses show that it is often possible to predict the demographic information of the authors based on textual features. However, some features learned by the models are specific to datasets. Moreover, models are prone to errors based on stereotypes associated with topical bias.

What Can Go Wrong in Authorship Profiling: Cross-Domain Analysis of Gender and Age Prediction

Measuring and mitigating gender bias in natural language processing (NLP) systems is crucial to ensure fair and ethical AI. However, a key challenge is the lack of explicit gender information in many textual datasets. This paper proposes two techniques, Identity Term Sampling (ITS) and Identity Term Pattern Extraction (ITPE), as alternatives to template-based approaches for measuring gender bias in text data. These approaches identify test data for measuring gender bias in the dataset itself and can be used to measure gender bias on any NLP classifier. We demonstrate the use of these approaches for measuring gender bias across various NLP classification tasks, including hate speech detection, fake news identification, and sentiment analysis. Additionally, we show how these techniques can benefit gender bias mitigation, proposing a variant of Counterfactual Data Augmentation (CDA), called Gender-Selective CDA (GS-CDA), which reduces the amount of data augmentation required in training data while effectively mitigating gender bias and maintaining overall classification performance.

Towards Fairer NLP Models: Handling Gender Bias In Classification Tasks

Gender inequality has been historically prevalent in academia, especially within the fields of Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM). In this study, we propose to examine gender bias in academic job descriptions in the STEM fields. We go a step further than previous studies that merely identify individual words as masculine-coded and feminine-coded and delve into the contextual language used in academic job advertisements. We design a novel approach to detect gender biases in job descriptions using Natural Language Processing techniques. Going beyond binary masculine-feminine stereotypes, we propose three big group types to understand gender bias in the language of job descriptions, namely agentic, balanced, and communal. We cluster similar information in job descriptions into these three groups using contrastive learning and various clustering techniques. This research contributes to the field of gender bias detection by providing a novel approach and methodology for categorizing gender bias in job descriptions, which can aid more effective and targeted job advertisements that will be equally appealing across all genders.

Investigating Gender Bias in STEM Job Advertisements

Relation Extraction (RE) is at the core of many Natural Language Understanding tasks, including knowledge-base population and Question Answering. However, any Natural Language Processing system is exposed to biases, and the analysis of these has not received much attention in RE. We propose a new method for inspecting bias in the RE pipeline, which is completely transparent in terms of interpretability. Specifically, in this work we analyze biases related to gender and place of birth. Our methodology includes (i) obtaining semantic triplets (subject, object, semantic relation) involving 'person' entities from RE resources, (ii) collecting meta-information ('gender' and 'place of birth') using Entity Linking technologies, and then (iii) analyze the distribution of triplets across different groups (e.g., men versus women). We investigate bias at two levels: In the training data of three commonly used RE datasets (SREDFM, CrossRE, NYT), and in the predictions of a state-of-the-art RE approach (ReLiK). To enable cross-dataset analysis, we introduce a taxonomy of relation types mapping the label sets of different RE datasets to a unified label space. Our findings reveal that bias is a compounded issue affecting underrepresented groups within data and predictions for RE.

Dissecting Biases in Relation Extraction: A Cross-Dataset Analysis on People's Gender and Origin

Gender bias in word representations has emerged as a prominent research area in recent years. While numerous studies have focused on measuring and addressing bias in English word embeddings, research on the Turkish language remains limited. This work aims to bridge this gap by conducting a comprehensive evaluation of gender bias in Turkish word embeddings, considering the dimensions of syntax, semantics, and morphology. We employ subword-based static word vectors trained on three distinct domains: web crawl, academical text, and medical text. Through the analysis of gender-associated words in each domain, we not only uncover gender bias but also gain insights into the unique characteristics of these domains. Additionally, we explore the influence of Turkish suffixes on word gender, providing a novel perspective on gender bias. Our findings reveal the pervasive nature of gender biases across various aspects of the Turkish language, including word frequency, semantics, parts-of-speech, and even the smallest linguistic unit - suffixes. Notably, we demonstrate that the majority of noun and verb lemmas, as well as adverbs and adjectives, exhibit masculine gendering in the general-purpose written language. This study is the first of its kind to offer a comprehensive examination of gender bias in the Turkish language.

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A Parameter-Efficient Multi-Objective Approach to Mitigate Stereotypical Bias in Language Models

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Do PLMs and Annotators Share the Same Gender Bias? Definition, Dataset, and Framework of Contextualized Gender Bias

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