United States

Previous work has examined how debiasing language models affect downstream tasks, specifically, how debiasing techniques influence task performance and whether debiased models also make impartial predictions in downstream tasks or not. However, what we don’t understand well yet is why debiasing methods have varying impacts on downstream tasks and how debiasing techniques affect internal components of language models, i.e., neurons, layers, and attentions. In this paper, we decompose the internal mechanisms of debiasing language models with respect to gender by applying causal mediation analysis to understand the influence of debiasing methods on toxicity detection as a downstream task. Our findings suggest a need to test the effectiveness of debiasing methods with different bias metrics, and to focus on changes in the behavior of certain components of the models, e.g.,first two layers of language models, and attention heads.

NAACL 2022

What Changed? Investigating Debiasing Methods using Causal Mediation Analysis

fairness in nlp

gender bias

language models

## 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

The GAP dataset is a Wikipedia-based evaluation dataset for gender bias detection in coreference resolution, containing mostly objective sentences. Since subjectivity is ubiquitous in our daily texts, it becomes necessary to evaluate models for both subjective and objective instances. In this work, we present a new evaluation dataset for gender bias in coreference resolution, GAP-Subjective, which increases the coverage of the original GAP dataset by including subjective sentences. We outline the methodology used to create this dataset. Firstly, we detect objective sentences and transfer them into their subjective variants using a sequence-to-sequence model. Secondly, we outline the thresholding techniques based on fluency and content preservation to maintain the quality of the sentences. Thirdly, we perform automated and human-based analysis of the style transfer and infer that the transferred sentences are of high quality. Finally, we benchmark both GAP and GAP-Subjective datasets using a BERT-based model and analyze its predictive performance and gender bias. 


Incorporating Subjectivity into Gendered Ambiguous Pronoun (GAP) Resolution using Style Transfer

In recent years, plenty of work has been done by the NLP community regarding gender bias detection and mitigation in language systems. Yet, to our knowledge, no one has focused on the difficult task of heteronormative language detection and mitigation. We consider this an urgent issue, since language technologies are growing increasingly present in the world and, as it has been proven by various studies, NLP systems with biases can create real-life adverse consequences for women, gender minorities and racial minorities and queer people. For these reasons, we propose and evaluate HeteroCorpus; a corpus created specifically for studying heterononormative language in English. Additionally, we propose a baseline set of classification experiments on our corpus, in order to show the performance of our corpus in classification tasks.

HeteroCorpus: A Corpus for Heteronormative Language Detection

This paper describes the system submitted by our team (UFRGSent) to SemEval-2022 Task 10: Structured Sentiment Analysis. We propose a multilingual approach that relies on a Question Answering model to find tuples consisting of holder, target, and opinion expression. The approach starts from general questions and uses the extracted tuple elements to find the remaining components. Finally, we employ an aspect sentiment classification model to classify the polarity of the entire tuple. Despite our method being in a mid-rank position in the SemEval competition, we show that the question-answering approach can achieve good coverage retrieving sentiment tuples, allowing room for improvements in the technique.

UFRGSent at SemEval-2022 Task 10: Structured Sentiment Analysis using a Question Answering

Massively multilingual language models (MMLMs) have become a widely-used representation method, and multiple large MMLMs were proposed in recent years. A trend is to train MMLMs on larger text corpora or with more layers. In this paper we set out to test recent popular MMLMs on detecting semantically ambiguous and complex named entities with an academic GPU budget. Our submission of a single model for 11 languages on the SemEval Task 11 MultiCoNER shows that a vanilla transformer-CRF with XLM-R outperforms the more recent RemBERT, ranking 9th from 26 submissions in the multilingual track. Compared to RemBERT, the XLM-R model has the additional advantage to fit on a slice of a multi-instance GPU. As contrary to expectations and recent findings, we found RemBERT to not be the best MMLM, we further set out to investigate this discrepancy with additional experiments on multilingual Wikipedia NER data. While we expected RemBERT to have an edge on that dataset as it is closer to its pre-training data, surprisingly, our results show that this is not the case, suggesting that text domain match does not explain the discrepancy.

Sliced at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Bigger, Better? Massively Multilingual
LMs for Multilingual Complex NER on an Academic GPU Budget

This presentation discusses the approaches and systems of the UA-KO team for the Korean portion of SemEval-2022 Task 11 on Multilingual Complex Named Entity Recognition.We fine-tuned Korean and multilingual BERT and RoBERTA models, conducted experiments on data augmentation, ensembles, and task-adaptive pretraining.

UA-KO at SemEval-2022 Task 11: Data Augmentation and Ensembles for Korean Named Entity Recognition

We present the Uppsala University system for SemEval-2022 Task 1: Comparing Dictionaries and Word Embeddings (CODWOE). We explore the performance of multilingual reverse dictionaries as well as the possibility of utilizing annotated data in other languages to improve the quality of a reverse dictionary in the target language. We mainly focus on characterbased embeddings. In our main experiment,
we train multilingual models by combining the training data from multiple languages. In an additional experiment, using resources beyond the shared task, we use the training data in Russian and French to improve the English reverse dictionary using unsupervised embeddings alignment and machine translation. The results show that multilingual models occasionally but not consistently can outperform the monolingual baselines. In addition, we demonstrate an improvement of an English reverse dictionary using translated entries from the Russian training data set.


Uppsala University at SemEval-2022 Task 1: Can Foreign Entries Enhancean English Reverse Dictionary?

This paper describes our system in SemEval-2022 Task 8, where participants were required to predict the similarity of two multilingual news articles. In the task of pairwise sentence and document scoring, there are two main approaches: Cross-Encoder, which inputs pairs of texts into a single encoder, and Bi-Encoder, which encodes each input independently. The former method often achieves higher performance, but the latter gave us a better result in SemEval-2022 Task 8. This paper presents our exploration of BERT-based Bi-Encoder approach for this task, and there are several findings such as pretrained models, pooling methods, translation, data separation, and the number of tokens. The weighted average ensemble of the four models achieved the competitive result and ranked in the top 12.

Nikkei at SemEval-2022 Task 8: Exploring BERT-based Bi-Encoder Approach for Pairwise Multilingual News Article Similarity

We propose a multilingual adversarial training model for determining whether a sentence contains an idiomatic expression. Given that a key challenge with this task is the limited size of annotated data, our model relies on pre-trained contextual representations from different multilingual state-of-the-art transformer-based language models (i.e., multilingual BERT and XLM-RoBERTa), and on adversarial training, a training method for further enhancing model generalization and robustness. Without relying on any human-crafted features, knowledge bases, or additional datasets other than the target datasets, our model achieved competitive
results and ranked 6th place in SubTask A (zero-shot) setting and 15th place in SubTask A (one-shot) setting.

OCHADAI at SemEval Task 2: Adversarial Training for Multiligual Idiomacity Detection




The presentation describes our winning system on SemEval 2022 Task 7. A replaced token detection pre-trained model is utilized with minorly different task-specific heads for SubTask-A: Multi-class Classification and SubTask-B: Ranking. Incorporating a pattern-aware ensemble method, our system achieves a 68.90% accuracy score and 0.8070 spearman's rank correlation score surpassing the 2nd place with a large margin by 2.7 and 2.2 percent points for SubTask-A and SubTask-B, respectively. Our approach is simple and easy to implement, and we conducted ablation studies and qualitative and quantitative analyses for the working strategies used in our system.





X-PuDu at SemEval-2022 Task 7: A Replaced Token Detection Task Pre-trained Model with Pattern-aware Ensembling for Identifying Plausible Clarifications

We participated at SemEval-2022 Task 1 “CODWOE: Comparing Dictionaries and WOrd Embeddings”, in the subtask for the reverse dictionary which consists in generating vectors from glosses. We use sequential models that integrate several neural networks, starting from Embeddings networks until the use of Dense networks, Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (BiLSTM) networks and LSTM networks. All glosses have been preprocessed in order to consider the best representation form of the meanings for all words that appears. We achieved very competitive results in reverse dictionary with a second position in English and French languages when using contextualized embeddings, and the same position for English, French and Spanish languages when using char embeddings.

Content not yet available

What Changed? Investigating Debiasing Methods using Causal Mediation Analysis

Downloads

Next from NAACL 2022

Incorporating Subjectivity into Gendered Ambiguous Pronoun (GAP) Resolution using Style Transfer

Similar lecture

Occupational Biases in Norwegian and Multilingual Language Models

Content not yet available

What Changed? Investigating Debiasing Methods using Causal Mediation Analysis

.css-70qvj9{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;}Downloads

Next from NAACL 2022

Incorporating Subjectivity into Gendered Ambiguous Pronoun (GAP) Resolution using Style Transfer

Similar lecture

Occupational Biases in Norwegian and Multilingual Language Models

Downloads