United States

Researchers have devised numerous ways to quantify social biases vested in pretrained language models. As some language models are capable of generating coherent completions given a set of textual prompts, several prompting datasets have been proposed to measure biases between social groups---posing language generation as a way of identifying biases. In this opinion paper, we analyze how specific choices of prompt sets, metrics, automatic tools and sampling strategies affect bias results. We find out that the practice of measuring biases through text completion is prone to yielding contradicting results under different experiment settings. We additionally provide recommendations for reporting biases in open-ended language generation for a more complete outlook of biases exhibited by a given language model.

NAACL 2022

Challenges in Measuring Bias via Open-Ended Language Generation

bias in language generation

ethics and bias

gender bias

## Welcome to NAACL 2022!
The Annual Meeting of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics (NAACL) is taking place July 10-15, 2022 as a hybrid event, in Seattle, WA and online. We are happy to welcome all of you to conference! 
 
The main conference program features oral presentations, in-person and virtual posters and demo sessions, a plenary session for our best paper presentations and awards, keynote presentations, a plenary panel on the place of linguistics and symbolic structures in NLP, and an Industrial Track panel on Careers in NLP.
 
Posters (including Findings of NAACL 2022) and demos are grouped by areas for both the in-person and the virtual sessions. For the virtual component, the talks will be on Zoom and the posters and the demos will be in GatherTown. The Student Research Workshop and will have an oral session and a poster session.
 
The program also features 6 Tutorials and 26 Workshops.
 
 We wish you a wonderful conference!
 
[The NAACL 2022 Organizing Committee](https://2022.naacl.org/committees/organization/)

2022 Annual Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics

workshop paper

Numerous works have analyzed biases in vision and pre-trained language models individually - however, less attention has been paid to how these biases interact in multimodal settings. This work extends text-based bias analysis methods to investigate multimodal language models, and analyzes intra- and intermodality
associations and biases learned by these models. Specifically, we demonstrate
that VL-BERT (Su et al., 2020) exhibits gender biases, often preferring to reinforce a
stereotype over faithfully describing the visual scene. We demonstrate these findings on a controlled case-study and extend them for a larger set of stereotypically gendered entities.

Worst of Both Worlds: Biases Compound in Pre-trained Vision-and-Language Models

Although approximately 50\% of medical school graduates today are women, female physicians tend to be underrepresented in senior positions, make less money than their male counterparts and receive fewer promotions. There is a growing body of literature demonstrating gender bias in various forms of evaluation in medicine, but this work was mainly conducted by looking for specific words using fixed dictionaries such as LIWC and focused on recommendation letters. We use a dataset of written and quantitative assessments of medical student performance on individual shifts of work, collected across multiple institutions, to investigate the extent to which gender bias exists in a day-to-day context for medical students. We investigate differences in the narrative comments given to male and female students by both male or female faculty assessors, using a fine-tuned BERT model. This allows us to examine whether groups are written about in systematically different ways, without relying on hand-crafted wordlists or topic models. We compare these results to results from the traditional LIWC method and find that, although we find no evidence of group-level gender bias in this dataset, terms related to family and children are used more in feedback given to women.

Assessing Group-level Gender Bias in Professional Evaluations: The Case of Medical Student End-of-Shift Feedback

Due to the complexity of bias and the opaque nature of current neural approaches, there is a rising interest in auditing language technologies. In this work, we contribute to such a line of inquiry by exploring the emergence of gender bias in Speech Translation (ST). As a new perspective, rather than focusing on the final
systems only, we examine their evolution over the course of training. In this way, we are able to account for different variables related to the learning dynamics of gender translation, and investigate when and how gender divides emerge in ST. Accordingly, for three language pairs (en–> es, fr, it) we compare how ST systems behave for masculine and feminine translation at several levels of granularity. We find that masculine and feminine curves are dissimilar, with the feminine one being characterized by a more erratic behaviour and late improvements over the course of training. Also, depending on the considered phenomena, their learning trends can be either antiphase or parallel. Overall, we show how such a progressive analysis can
inform on the reliability and time-wise acquisition of gender, which is concealed by static evaluations and standard metrics

On the Dynamics of Gender Learning in Speech Translation

The size of pretrained models is increasing,
and so is their performance on a variety of NLP
tasks. However, as their memorization capacity
grows, they might pick up more social biases.
In this work, we examine the connection be-
tween model size and its gender bias (specifi-
cally, occupational gender bias). We measure
bias in three masked language model families
(RoBERTa, DeBERTa, and T5) in two setups:
directly using prompt based method, and using
a downstream task (Winogender). We find on
the one hand that larger models receive higher
bias scores on the former task, but when eval-
uated on the latter, they make fewer gender
errors. To examine these potentially conflicting
results, we carefully investigate the behavior of
the different models on Winogender. We find
that while larger models outperform smaller
ones, the probability that their mistakes are
caused by gender bias is higher. Moreover,
we find that the proportion of stereotypical er-
rors compared to anti-stereotypical ones grows
with the model size. Our findings highlight the
potential risks that can arise from increasing
model size.

Fewer Errors, but More Stereotypes? The Effect of Model Size on Gender Bias

As the use of natural language processing increases in our day-to-day life, the need to address gender bias inherent in these systems also amplifies. This is because the inherent bias interferes with the semantic structure of the output of these systems while performing tasks in natural language processing. While research is being done in English to quantify and mitigate bias, debiasing methods in Indic Languages are either relatively nascent or absent for some Indic languages altogether. Most Indic languages are gendered, i.e., each noun is assigned a gender according to each language's rules of grammar. As a consequence, evaluation differs from what is done in English. This paper evaluates the gender stereotypes in Hindi and Marathi languages. The methodologies will differ from the ones in the English language because there are masculine and feminine counterparts in the case of some words. We create a dataset of neutral and gendered occupation words, and emotion words and measure bias with the help of Embedding Coherence Test (ECT) and Relative Norm Distance (RND). We also attempt to mitigate this bias from the embeddings. Experiments show that our proposed debiasing techniques reduce gender bias in these languages.

Mitigating Gender Stereotypes in Hindi and Marathi

This presentation introduces a taxonomy of phenomena which cause bias in machine translation, covering gender bias (people being male and/or female), number bias (singular you versus plural you) and formality bias (informal you versus formal you). The taxonomy is a formalism for describing situations in machine translation when the source text leaves some of these properties unspecified (eg. does not say whether doctor is male or female) but the target language requires the property to be specified (eg. because it does not have a gender-neutral word for doctor). The formalism described here is used internally by Fairslator, a web-based tool for detecting and correcting bias in the output of any machine translator.

A taxonomy of bias-causing ambiguities in machine translation

Pretrained language models are publicly available and constantly finetuned for various real-life applications. As they become capable of grasping complex contextual information, harmful biases are likely increasingly intertwined with those models. This paper analyses gender bias in BERT models with two main contributions: First, a novel bias measure is introduced, defining biases as the difference in sentiment valuation of female and male sample versions. Second, we comprehensively analyse BERT’s biases on the example of a realistic IMDB movie classifier. By systematically varying elements of the training pipeline, we can conclude regarding their impact on the final model bias. Seven different public BERT models in nine training conditions, i.e. 63 models in total, are compared. Almost all conditions yield significant gender biases. Results indicate that reflected biases stem from public BERT models rather than task-specific data, emphasising the weight of responsible usage.

Gender Bias in BERT - Measuring and Analysing Biases through Sentiment Rating in a Realistic Downstream Classification Task

In this paper we explore how a demographic distribution of occupations, along gender dimensions, is reflected in pre-trained language models. We give a descriptive assessment of the distribution of occupations, and investigate to what extent these are reflected in four Norwegian and two multilingual models. To this end, we introduce a set of simple bias probes, and perform five different tasks combining gendered pronouns, first names, and a set of occupations from the Norwegian statistics bureau. We show that language specific models obtain more accurate results, and are much closer to the real-world distribution of clearly gendered occupations. However, we see that none of the models have correct representations of the occupations that are demographically balanced between genders. We also discuss the importance of the training data on which the models were trained on, and argue that template-based bias probes can sometimes be fragile, and a simple alteration in a template can change a model's behavior.

Occupational Biases in Norwegian and Multilingual Language Models

Films are a rich source of data for natural language processing. OpenSubtitles is a popular movie script dataset, used for training models for tasks such as machine translation and dialogue generation. However, movies often contain biases that reflect society at the time, and these biases may be introduced during pre-training and influence downstream models. We perform sentiment analysis on template infilling and the Sentence Embedding Association Test to measure how BERT-based language models change after continued pre-training on OpenSubtitles. We consider gender bias as a primary motivating case for this analysis, while also measuring other social biases such as disability. We show that sentiment analysis on template infilling is not an effective measure of bias due to the rarity of disability and gender identifying tokens in the movie dialogue. We extend our analysis to a longitudinal study of bias in film dialogue over the last 110 years and find that continued pre-training on OpenSubtitles encodes additional bias into BERT. We show that BERT learns associations that reflect the biases and representation of each film era, suggesting that additional care must be taken when using historical data.

Evaluating Gender Bias Transfer from Film Data

Natural Language Processing (NLP), through its several applications, has been considered as one of the most valuable field in interdisciplinary researches, as well as in computer science. However, it is not without its flaws. One of the most common flaws is bias. 
This paper examines the main linguistic challenges of Inuktitut, an indigenous language of Canada, and focuses on gender bias identification and mitigation.
We explore the unique characteristics of this language to help us understand the right techniques that can be used to identify and mitigate implicit biases. We use some methods to quantify the gender bias existing in Inuktitut word embeddings; then we proceed to mitigate the bias and evaluate the performance of the debiased embeddings. 
Next, we explain how approaches for detecting and reducing bias in English embeddings may be transferred to Inuktitut embeddings by properly taking into account the language's particular characteristics. 
We compare the effect of the debiasing techniques on Inuktitut and English. Finally, we highlight some future research directions which will further help to push the boundaries.

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