Thailand

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.

ACL 2024

Towards Fairer NLP Models: Handling Gender Bias In Classification Tasks

gender bias

classification

fairness

bias mitigation

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. Our Virtual Poster Sessions will take place online Thursday, August 22, 2024.

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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.

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.

Gender Bias in Turkish Word Embeddings: A Comprehensive Study of Syntax, Semantics and Morphology Across Domains

Gender bias has been extensively studied in both the educational field and the Natural Language Processing (NLP) field, the former using human coding to identify patterns associated with and causes of gender bias in text and the latter to detect, measure and mitigate gender bias in NLP output and models. This work aims to use NLP to facilitate automatic, quantitative analysis of educational text within the framework of a gender bias taxonomy. Analyses of both educational texts and a lexical resource (WordNet) reveal patterns of bias that can inform and aid educators in updating textbooks and lexical resources and in designing assessment items.

Disagreeable, Slovenly, Honest and Un-named Women? Investigating Gender Bias in English Educational Resources by Extending Existing Gender Bias Taxonomies

Name-based gender prediction has traditionally categorized individuals as either female or male based on their names, using a binary classification system. That binary approach can be problematic in the cases of gender-neutral names that do not align with any one gender, among other reasons. Relying solely on binary gender categories without recognizing gender-neutral names can reduce the inclusiveness of gender prediction tasks. We introduce an additional gender category, i.e., ``neutral'', to study and address potential gender biases in Large Language Models (LLMs). We evaluate the performance of several foundational and large language models in predicting gender based on first names only. Additionally, we investigate the impact of adding birth years to enhance the accuracy of gender prediction, accounting for shifting associations between names and genders over time. Our findings indicate that most LLMs identify male and female names with high accuracy (over 80\%) but struggle with gender-neutral names (under 40\%), and the accuracy of gender prediction is higher for English-based first names than non-English names. The experimental results show that incorporating the birth year does not improve the overall accuracy of gender prediction, especially for names with evolving gender associations. We recommend using caution when applying LLMs for gender identification in downstream tasks, particularly when dealing with non-binary gender labels.

Beyond Binary Gender Labels: Revealing Gender Bias in LLMs through Gender-Neutral Name Predictions

In this paper, we revisit the seminal work of Garimella et al. 2019, who reported that dependency parsers learn demographically-related signals from their training data and perform differently on sentences authored by people of different genders. We re-run all the parsing experiments from Garimella et al. 2019 and find that their results are not reproducible. Additionally, the original patterns suggesting the presence of gender biases fail to generalize to other treebank and parsing architecture. Instead, our data analysis uncovers methodological shortcomings in the initial study that artificially introduced differences into female and male datasets during preprocessing. These disparities potentially compromised the validity of the original conclusions.

Is there Gender Bias in Dependency Parsing? Revisiting "Women's Syntactic Resilience"

Gender bias is not only prevalent in Large Language Models (LLMs) and their training data, but also firmly ingrained into the structural aspects of language itself. 
Therefore, adapting linguistic structures within LLM training data to promote gender-inclusivity can make gender representations within the model more inclusive.
The focus of our work are gender-exclusive affixes in English, such as in 'show-girl' or 'man-cave', which can perpetuate gender stereotypes and binary conceptions of gender.
We use an LLM training dataset to compile a catalogue of 692 gender-exclusive terms along with gender-neutral variants and from this, develop a gender-inclusive fine-tuning dataset, the 'Tiny Heap'. 
Fine-tuning three different LLMs with this dataset, we observe an overall reduction in gender-stereotyping tendencies across the models. Our approach provides a practical method for enhancing gender inclusivity in LLM training data and contributes to incorporating queer-feminist linguistic activism in bias mitigation research in NLP.

From 'Showgirls' to 'Performers': Fine-tuning with Gender-inclusive Language for Bias Reduction in LLMs

Sociodemographic bias in language models (LMs) has the potential for harm when deployed in real-world settings. This paper presents a comprehensive survey of the past decade of research on sociodemographic bias in LMs, organized into a typology that facilitates examining the different aims: types of bias, quantifying bias, and debiasing techniques. We track the evolution of the latter two questions, then identify current trends and their limitations, as well as emerging techniques. To guide future research towards more effective and reliable solutions, and to help authors situate their work within this broad landscape, we conclude with a checklist of open questions.

Sociodemographic Bias in Language Models: A Survey and Forward Path

Personal names simultaneously differentiate individuals and categorize them in ways that are important in a given society. While the natural language processing community has thus associated personal names with sociodemographic characteristics in a variety of tasks, researchers have engaged to varying degrees with the established methodological problems in doing so. To guide future work that uses names and sociodemographic characteristics, we provide an overview of relevant research: first, we present an interdisciplinary background on names and naming. We then survey the issues inherent to associating names with sociodemographic attributes, covering problems of validity (e.g., systematic error, construct validity), as well as ethical concerns (e.g., harms, differential impact, cultural insensitivity). Finally, we provide guiding questions along with normative recommendations to avoid validity and ethical pitfalls when dealing with names and sociodemographic characteristics in natural language processing.

Stop! In the Name of Flaws: Disentangling Personal Names and Sociodemographic Attributes in NLP

We evaluate gender biases in multilingual multimodal image and text models in two settings: text-to-image retrieval and text-to-image generation, to show that even seemingly gender-neutral traits generate biased results. We evaluate our framework in the context of people from India, working with two languages: English and Hindi. We work with frameworks built around mCLIP-based models to ensure a thorough evaluation of recent state-of-the-art models in the multilingual setting due to their potential for widespread applications. We analyze the results across 50 traits for retrieval and 8 traits for generation, showing that current multilingual multimodal models are biased towards men for most traits, and this problem is further exacerbated for lower-resource languages like Hindi. We further discuss potential reasons behind this observation, particularly stemming from the bias introduced by the pretraining datasets.

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Towards Fairer NLP Models: Handling Gender Bias In Classification Tasks

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Investigating Gender Bias in STEM Job Advertisements

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