how is mitigation of gender bias evaluated?
Using INLINEFORM0 and INLINEFORM1
Gender bias exists in natural language datasets which neural language models tend to learn, resulting in biased text generation. In this research, we propose a debiasing approach based on the loss function modification. We introduce a new term to the loss function which attempts to equalize the probabilities of male and female words in the output. Using an array of bias evaluation metrics, we provide empirical evidence that our approach successfully mitigates gender bias in language models without increasing perplexity. In comparison to existing debiasing strategies, data augmentation, and word embedding debiasing, our method performs better in several aspects, especially in reducing gender bias in occupation words. Finally, we introduce a combination of data augmentation and our approach, and show that it outperforms existing strategies in all bias evaluation metrics.
Natural Language Processing (NLP) models are shown to capture unwanted biases and stereotypes found in the training data which raise concerns about socioeconomic, ethnic and gender discrimination when these models are deployed for public use BIBREF0 , BIBREF1 . There are numerous studies that identify algorithmic bias in NLP applications. BIBREF2 showed ethnic bias in Google autocomplete suggestions whereas BIBREF3 found gender bias in advertisement delivery systems. Additionally, BIBREF1 demonstrated that coreference resolution systems exhibit gender bias. Language modelling is a pivotal task in NLP with important downstream applications such as text generation BIBREF4 . Recent studies by BIBREF0 and BIBREF5 have shown that this task is vulnerable to gender bias in the training corpus. Two prior works focused on reducing bias in language modelling by data preprocessing BIBREF0 and word embedding debiasing BIBREF5 . In this study, we investigate the efficacy of bias reduction during training by introducing a new loss function which encourages the language model to equalize the probabilities of predicting gendered word pairs like he and she. Although we recognize that gender is non-binary, for the purpose of this study, we focus on female and male words. Our main contributions are summarized as follows: i) to our best knowledge, this study is the first one to investigate bias alleviation in text generation by direct modification of the loss function; ii) our new loss function effectively reduces gender bias in the language models during training by equalizing the probabilities of male and female words in the output; iii) we show that end-to-end debiasing of the language model can achieve word embedding debiasing; iv) we provide an interpretation of our results and draw a comparison to other existing debiasing methods. We show that our method, combined with an existing method, counterfactual data augmentation, achieves the best result and outperforms all existing methods.