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Despite inextricable ties between race and language, little work has considered race in NLP research and development. In this work, we survey 79 papers from the ACL anthology that mention race. These papers reveal various types of race-related bias in all stages of NLP model development, highlighting the need for proactive consideration of how NLP systems can uphold racial hierarchies. However, persistent gaps in research on race and NLP remain: race has been siloed as a niche topic and remains ignored in many NLP tasks; most work operationalizes race as a fixed single-dimensional variable with a ground-truth label, which risks reinforcing differences produced by historical racism; and the voices of historically marginalized people are nearly absent in NLP literature. By identifying where and how NLP literature has and has not considered race, especially in comparison to related fields, our work calls for inclusion and racial justice in NLP research practices.

ACL-IJCNLP 2021

A Survey of Race, Racism, and Anti-Racism in NLP

race

survey

bias

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technical paper

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Registration is now open

The great event is jointly organized by the Association for Computational Linguistics (ACL) and Asian Federation of Natural Language Processing (AFNLP).

Targeted syntactic evaluations have demonstrated the ability of language models to perform subject-verb agreement given difficult contexts. 
To elucidate the mechanisms by which the models accomplish this behavior, this study applies causal mediation analysis to pre-trained neural language models.
We investigate the magnitude of models' preferences for grammatical inflections, as well as whether neurons process subject-verb agreement similarly across sentences with different syntactic structures.
We uncover similarities and differences across architectures and model sizes—notably, that larger models do not necessarily learn stronger preferences.
We also observe two distinct mechanisms for producing subject-verb agreement depending on the syntactic structure of the input sentence.
Finally, we find that language models rely on similar sets of neurons when given sentences with similar syntactic structure.

Causal Analysis of Syntactic Agreement Mechanisms in Neural Language Models

NLP has a rich history of representing our prior understanding of language in the form of graphs. Recent work on analyzing contextualized text representations has focused on hand-designed probe models to understand how and to what extent do these representations encode a particular linguistic phenomenon. However, due to the inter-dependence of various phenomena and randomness of training probe models, detecting how these representations encode the rich information in these linguistic graphs remains a challenging problem. In this paper, we propose a new information-theoretic probe, Bird's Eye, which is a fairly simple probe method for detecting if and how these representations encode the information in these linguistic graphs. Instead of using model performance, our probe takes an information-theoretic view of probing and estimates the mutual information between the linguistic graph embedded in a continuous space and the contextualized word representations. Furthermore, we also propose an approach to use our probe to investigate localized linguistic information in the linguistic graphs using perturbation analysis. We call this probing setup Worm's Eye. Using these probes, we analyze the BERT models on its ability to encode a syntactic and a semantic graph structure, and find that these models encode to some degree both syntactic as well as semantic information; albeit syntactic information to a greater extent.

Bird’s Eye: Probing for Linguistic Graph Structures with a Simple Information-Theoretic Approach

Previous literatures show that pre-trained masked language models (MLMs) such as BERT can achieve competitive factual knowledge extraction performance on some datasets, indicating that MLMs can potentially be a reliable knowledge source. In this paper, we conduct a rigorous study to explore the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs over different extraction paradigms. By investigating the behaviors of MLMs, we find that previous decent performance mainly owes to the biased prompts which overfit dataset artifacts. Furthermore, incorporating illustrative cases and external contexts improve knowledge prediction mainly due to entity type guidance and golden answer leakage. Our findings shed light on the underlying predicting mechanisms of MLMs, and strongly question the previous conclusion that current MLMs can potentially serve as reliable factual knowledge bases.

Knowledgeable or Educated Guess? Revisiting Language Models as Knowledge Bases

We study the problem of generating data poisoning attacks against Knowledge Graph Embedding (KGE) models for the task of link prediction in knowledge graphs. To poison KGE models, we propose to exploit their inductive abilities which are captured through the relationship patterns like symmetry, inversion and composition in the knowledge graph. Specifically, to degrade the model's prediction confidence on target facts, we propose to improve the model's prediction confidence on a set of decoy facts. Thus, we craft adversarial additions that can improve the model's prediction confidence on decoy facts through different inference patterns. Our experiments demonstrate that the proposed poisoning attacks outperform state-of-art baselines on four KGE models for two publicly available datasets. We also find that the symmetry pattern based attacks generalize across all model-dataset combinations which indicates the sensitivity of KGE models to this pattern.

Poisoning Knowledge Graph Embeddings via Relation Inference Patterns

Pre-trained language models have achieved human-level performance on many Machine Reading Comprehension (MRC) tasks, but it remains unclear whether these models truly understand language or answer questions by exploiting statistical biases in datasets. Here, we demonstrate a simple yet effective method to attack MRC models and reveal the statistical biases in these models. We apply the method to the RACE dataset, for which the answer to each MRC question is selected from 4 options. It is found that several pre-trained language models, including BERT, ALBERT, and RoBERTa, show consistent preference to some options, even when these options are irrelevant to the question. When interfered by these irrelevant options, the performance of MRC models can be reduced from human-level performance to the chance-level performance. Human readers, however, are not clearly affected by these irrelevant options. Finally, we propose an augmented training method that can greatly reduce models' statistical biases.

Using Adversarial Attacks to Reveal the Statistical Bias in Machine Reading Comprehension Models

A common factor in bias measurement methods is the use of hand-curated seed lexicons, but there remains little guidance for their selection. We gather seeds used in prior work, documenting their common sources and rationales, and in case studies of three English-language corpora, we enumerate the different types of social biases and linguistic features that, once encoded in the seeds, can affect subsequent bias measurements. Seeds developed in one context are often re-used in other contexts, but documentation and evaluation remain necessary precursors to relying on seeds for sensitive measurements.

Bad Seeds: Evaluating Lexical Methods for Bias Measurement

In this paper, we introduce the new task of controllable text edition, in which we take as input a long text, a question, and a target answer, and the output is a minimally modified text, so that it fits the target answer. This task is very important in many situations, such as changing some conditions, consequences, or properties in a legal document, or changing some key information of an event in a news text. This is very challenging, as it is hard to obtain a parallel corpus for training, and we need to first find all text positions that should be changed and then decide how to change them. We constructed the new dataset WikiBioCTE for this task based on the existing dataset \textsc{WikiBio} (originally created for table-to-text generation). We use WikiBioCTE for training, and manually labeled a test set for testing. We also propose novel evaluation metrics and a novel method for solving the new task. Experimental results on the test set show that our proposed method is a good fit for this novel NLP task.

Controlling Text Edition by Changing Answers of Specific Questions

Recently, driven by numerous publicly available machine reading comprehension (MRC) datasets, MRC systems have made some progress. These datasets, however, have two major limitations: 1) the defined tasks are relatively simple, and 2) they do not provide explainable evaluation which is critical to objectively and comprehensively review the reasoning capabilities of current MRC systems. In this paper, we propose GCRC, a new dataset with challenging and high-quality multi-choice questions, collected from Gaokao Chinese (Chinese subject from the National College Entrance Examination of China). We have manually labelled three types of evidence to evaluate MRC systems’ reasoning process: 1) sentence-level relevant supporting facts in an article required for answering a given question, 2) error reason of a distractor (i.e., an incorrect option) for explaining why a distractor should be eliminated, which is an important reasoning step for multi-choice questions, and 3) types of reasoning skills required for answering questions. Extensive experiments show that our proposed dataset is more challenging and very useful for identifying the limitations of existing MRC systems in an explainable way, facilitating researchers to develop novel machine learning and reasoning approaches to tackle this challenging research problem.

GCRC: A New Challenging MRC Dataset from Gaokao Chinese for Explainable Evaluation

Identifying events and mapping them to a pre-defined taxonomy of event types has long been an important NLP problem. Most previous work has relied heavily on labor-intensive, domain-specific, annotation, ignoring the {\em semantic meaning} of the event types’ labels. Consequently, the learned models cannot effectively generalize to new label taxonomies and domains. We propose a zero-shot event extraction approach, which first identifies events with existing tools (e.g., SRL) and then maps them to a given taxonomy of event types in a zero-shot manner. Specifically, we leverage label representations induced by pre-trained language models, and map identified events to the target types via representation similarity. To semantically type the events’ arguments, we further use the definition of the events (e.g., argument of type ``Victim'' appears as the argument of event of type ``Attack'') as global constraints to regularize the prediction. The proposed approach is shown to be very effective on the ACE-2005 dataset, which has 33 trigger and 22 argument types. Without using any annotation, we successfully map 83% of the triggers and 54% of the arguments to the semantic correct types, almost doubling the performance of previous zero-shot approaches.

{Z}ero-shot {L}abel-Aware {E}vent {T}rigger and {A}rgument {C}lassification

Aspect sentiment classification (ASC) aims at determining sentiments expressed towards different aspects in a sentence. While state-of-the-art ASC models have achieved remarkable performance, they are recently shown to suffer from the issue of robustness. Particularly in two common scenarios: when domains of test and training data are different (out-of-domain scenario) or test data is adversarially perturbed (adversarial scenario), ASC models may attend to irrelevant words and neglect opinion expressions that truly describe diverse aspects. To tackle the challenge, in this paper, we hypothesize that position bias (i.e., the words closer to a concerning aspect would carry a higher degree of importance) is crucial for building more robust ASC models by reducing the probability of mis-attending. Accordingly, we propose two mechanisms for capturing position bias, namely position-biased weight and position-biased dropout, which can be flexibly injected into existing models to enhance representations for classification. Experiments conducted on out-of-domain and adversarial datasets demonstrate that our proposed approaches largely improve the robustness and effectiveness of current models.

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