Thailand

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 &#39;person&#39; entities from RE resources, (ii) collecting meta-information (&#39;gender&#39; and &#39;place of birth&#39;) 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.

ACL 2024

Dissecting Biases in Relation Extraction: A Cross-Dataset Analysis on People&#39;s Gender and Origin

socio-demographic biases

relation extraction

bias

information extraction

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

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 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.

Evaluating Gender Bias in Multilingual Multimodal AI Models: Insights from an Indian Context

Machine translation often suffers from biased data and algorithms that can lead to unacceptable errors in system output. While bias in gender norms has been investigated, less is known about whether MT systems encode bias about social relationships, e.g., "the lawyer kissed her wife." We investigate the degree of bias against same-gender relationships in MT systems, using generated template sentences drawn from several noun-gender languages (e.g., Spanish) and comprised of popular occupation nouns. We find that three popular MT services consistently fail to accurately translate sentences concerning relationships between entities of the same gender. The error rate varies considerably based on the context, and same-gender sentences referencing high female-representation occupations are translated with lower accuracy. We provide this work as a case study in the evaluation of intrinsic bias in NLP systems with respect to social relationships.

Whose wife is it anyway? Assessing bias against same-gender relationships in machine translation

This study explores the effect of annotators' demographic features on labeling sexist content in social media datasets, specifically focusing on the EXIST dataset, which includes direct sexist messages, reports and descriptions of sexist experiences and stereotypes. We investigate how various demographic backgrounds influence annotation outcomes and examine methods to incorporate these features into BERT-based model training. Our experiments demonstrate that adding demographic information improves performance in detecting sexism and assessing intention of the author.

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

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

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