Which methods are considered to find examples of biases and unwarranted inferences??
Looking for adjectives marking the noun "baby" and also looking for most-common adjectives related to certain nouns using POS-tagging
An untested assumption behind the crowdsourced descriptions of the images in the Flickr30K dataset (Young et al., 2014) is that they"focus only on the information that can be obtained from the image alone"(Hodosh et al., 2013, p. 859). This paper presents some evidence against this assumption, and provides a list of biases and unwarranted inferences that can be found in the Flickr30K dataset. Finally, it considers methods to find examples of these, and discusses how we should deal with stereotype-driven descriptions in future applications.
The Flickr30K dataset BIBREF0 is a collection of over 30,000 images with 5 crowdsourced descriptions each. It is commonly used to train and evaluate neural network models that generate image descriptions (e.g. BIBREF2 ). An untested assumption behind the dataset is that the descriptions are based on the images, and nothing else. Here are the authors (about the Flickr8K dataset, a subset of Flickr30K): “By asking people to describe the people, objects, scenes and activities that are shown in a picture without giving them any further information about the context in which the picture was taken, we were able to obtain conceptual descriptions that focus only on the information that can be obtained from the image alone.” BIBREF1  What this assumption overlooks is the amount of interpretation or recontextualization carried out by the annotators. Let us take a concrete example. Figure FIGREF1 shows an image from the Flickr30K dataset. This image comes with the five descriptions below. All but the first one contain information that cannot come from the image alone. Relevant parts are highlighted in bold: We need to understand that the descriptions in the Flickr30K dataset are subjective descriptions of events. This can be a good thing: the descriptions tell us what are the salient parts of each image to the average human annotator. So the two humans in Figure FIGREF1 are relevant, but the two soap dispensers are not. But subjectivity can also result in stereotypical descriptions, in this case suggesting that the male is more likely to be the manager, and the female is more likely to be the subordinate. rashtchian2010collecting do note that some descriptions are speculative in nature, which they say hurts the accuracy and the consistency of the descriptions. But the problem is not with the lack of consistency here. Quite the contrary: the problem is that stereotypes may be pervasive enough for the data to be consistently biased. And so language models trained on this data may propagate harmful stereotypes, such as the idea that women are less suited for leadership positions. This paper aims to give an overview of linguistic bias and unwarranted inferences resulting from stereotypes and prejudices. I will build on earlier work on linguistic bias in general BIBREF3 , providing examples from the Flickr30K data, and present a taxonomy of unwarranted inferences. Finally, I will discuss several methods to analyze the data in order to detect biases.