Towards dialect-inclusive recognition in a low-resource language: are balanced corpora the answer?

ASR systems are generally built for the spoken 'standard', and their performance declines for non-standard dialects/varieties. This is a problem for a language like Irish, where there is no single spoken standard, but rather three major dialects: Ulster (Ul), Connacht (Co) and Munster (Mu). As a diagnostic to quantify the effect of the speaker's dialect on recognition performance, 12 ASR systems were trained, firstly using baseline dialect-balanced training corpora, and then using modified versions of the baseline corpora, where dialect-specific materials were either subtracted or added. Results indicate that dialect-balanced corpora do not yield a similar performance across the dialects: the Ul dialect consistently underperforms, whereas Mu yields lowest WERs. There is a close relationship between Co and Mu dialects, but one that is not symmetrical. These results will guide future corpus collection and system building strategies to optimise for cross-dialect performance equity.Comment: Accepted to Interspeech 2023, Dubli

Directional Pairwise Class Confusion Bias and Its Mitigation

Recent advances in Natural Language Processing have led to powerful and sophisticated models like BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) that have bias. These models are mostly trained on text corpora that deviate in important ways from the text encountered by a chatbot in a problem-specific context. While a lot of research in the past has focused on measuring and mitigating bias with respect to protected attributes (stereotyping like gender, race, ethnicity, etc.), there is lack of research in model bias with respect to classification labels. We investigate whether a classification model hugely favors one class with respect to another. We introduce a bias evaluation method called directional pairwise class confusion bias that highlights the chatbot intent classification model’s bias on pairs of classes. Finally, we also present two strategies to mitigate this bias using example biased pairs

Evaluating Bias and Fairness in Gender-Neutral Pretrained Vision-and-Language Models

Pretrained machine learning models are known to perpetuate and even amplify existing biases in data, which can result in unfair outcomes that ultimately impact user experience. Therefore, it is crucial to understand the mechanisms behind those prejudicial biases to ensure that model performance does not result in discriminatory behaviour toward certain groups or populations. In this work, we define gender bias as our case study. We quantify bias amplification in pretraining and after fine-tuning on three families of vision-and-language models. We investigate the connection, if any, between the two learning stages, and evaluate how bias amplification reflects on model performance. Overall, we find that bias amplification in pretraining and after fine-tuning are independent. We then examine the effect of continued pretraining on gender-neutral data, finding that this reduces group disparities, i.e., promotes fairness, on VQAv2 and retrieval tasks without significantly compromising task performance.Comment: To appear in EMNLP 202

Undesirable biases in NLP: Averting a crisis of measurement

As Natural Language Processing (NLP) technology rapidly develops and spreads into daily life, it becomes crucial to anticipate how its use could harm people. However, our ways of assessing the biases of NLP models have not kept up. While especially the detection of English gender bias in such models has enjoyed increasing research attention, many of the measures face serious problems, as it is often unclear what they actually measure and how much they are subject to measurement error. In this paper, we provide an interdisciplinary approach to discussing the issue of NLP model bias by adopting the lens of psychometrics -- a field specialized in the measurement of concepts like bias that are not directly observable. We pair an introduction of relevant psychometric concepts with a discussion of how they could be used to evaluate and improve bias measures. We also argue that adopting psychometric vocabulary and methodology can make NLP bias research more efficient and transparent

A Survey on Fairness in Large Language Models

Large language models (LLMs) have shown powerful performance and development prospect and are widely deployed in the real world. However, LLMs can capture social biases from unprocessed training data and propagate the biases to downstream tasks. Unfair LLM systems have undesirable social impacts and potential harms. In this paper, we provide a comprehensive review of related research on fairness in LLMs. First, for medium-scale LLMs, we introduce evaluation metrics and debiasing methods from the perspectives of intrinsic bias and extrinsic bias, respectively. Then, for large-scale LLMs, we introduce recent fairness research, including fairness evaluation, reasons for bias, and debiasing methods. Finally, we discuss and provide insight on the challenges and future directions for the development of fairness in LLMs.Comment: 12 pages, 2 figures, 101 reference

MISMIS: Desinformación y agresividad en los medios de comunicación social: agregando información y analizando el lenguaje

[EN] The general objectives of the project are to address and monitor misinformation (biased and fake news) and miscommunication (aggressive language and hate speech) in social media, as well as to establish a high quality methodological standard for the whole research community (i) by developing rich annotated datasets, a data repository and online evaluation services; (ii) by proposing suitable evaluation metrics; and (iii) by organizing evaluation campaigns to foster research on the above issues.[ES] Los objetivos generales del proyecto son abordar y monitorizar la desinformación (noticias sesgadas y falsas) y la mala comunicación (lenguaje agresivo y mensajes de odio) en los medios de comunicación social, así como establecer un estándar metodológico de calidad para toda la comunidad investigadora mediante: i) el desarrollo de datasets anotados, un repositorio de datos y servicios de evaluación online; ii) la propuesta de métricas de evaluación adecuadas; y iii) la organización de campañas de evaluación para fomentar la investigación sobre las cuestiones mencionadas.The MISMIS project (PGC2018-096212-B) is funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities.Rosso, P.; Casacuberta Nolla, F.; Gonzalo, J.; Plaza, L.; Carrillo, J.; Amigó, E.; Verdejo, MF.... (2020). MISMIS: Misinformation and Miscommunication in social media: aggregating information and analysing language. Procesamiento del Lenguaje Natural. (65):101-104. https://doi.org/10.26342/2020-65-13S1011046

Survey on Sociodemographic Bias in Natural Language Processing

Deep neural networks often learn unintended biases during training, which might have harmful effects when deployed in real-world settings. This paper surveys 209 papers on bias in NLP models, most of which address sociodemographic bias. To better understand the distinction between bias and real-world harm, we turn to ideas from psychology and behavioral economics to propose a definition for sociodemographic bias. We identify three main categories of NLP bias research: types of bias, quantifying bias, and debiasing. We conclude that current approaches on quantifying bias face reliability issues, that many of the bias metrics do not relate to real-world biases, and that current debiasing techniques are superficial and hide bias rather than removing it. Finally, we provide recommendations for future work.Comment: 23 pages, 1 figur

Should ChatGPT be Biased? Challenges and Risks of Bias in Large Language Models

As the capabilities of generative language models continue to advance, the implications of biases ingrained within these models have garnered increasing attention from researchers, practitioners, and the broader public. This article investigates the challenges and risks associated with biases in large-scale language models like ChatGPT. We discuss the origins of biases, stemming from, among others, the nature of training data, model specifications, algorithmic constraints, product design, and policy decisions. We explore the ethical concerns arising from the unintended consequences of biased model outputs. We further analyze the potential opportunities to mitigate biases, the inevitability of some biases, and the implications of deploying these models in various applications, such as virtual assistants, content generation, and chatbots. Finally, we review the current approaches to identify, quantify, and mitigate biases in language models, emphasizing the need for a multi-disciplinary, collaborative effort to develop more equitable, transparent, and responsible AI systems. This article aims to stimulate a thoughtful dialogue within the artificial intelligence community, encouraging researchers and developers to reflect on the role of biases in generative language models and the ongoing pursuit of ethical AI.Comment: Submitted to Machine Learning with Application

State-of-the-art generalisation research in NLP: a taxonomy and review

The ability to generalise well is one of the primary desiderata of natural language processing (NLP). Yet, what `good generalisation' entails and how it should be evaluated is not well understood, nor are there any common standards to evaluate it. In this paper, we aim to lay the ground-work to improve both of these issues. We present a taxonomy for characterising and understanding generalisation research in NLP, we use that taxonomy to present a comprehensive map of published generalisation studies, and we make recommendations for which areas might deserve attention in the future. Our taxonomy is based on an extensive literature review of generalisation research, and contains five axes along which studies can differ: their main motivation, the type of generalisation they aim to solve, the type of data shift they consider, the source by which this data shift is obtained, and the locus of the shift within the modelling pipeline. We use our taxonomy to classify over 400 previous papers that test generalisation, for a total of more than 600 individual experiments. Considering the results of this review, we present an in-depth analysis of the current state of generalisation research in NLP, and make recommendations for the future. Along with this paper, we release a webpage where the results of our review can be dynamically explored, and which we intend to up-date as new NLP generalisation studies are published. With this work, we aim to make steps towards making state-of-the-art generalisation testing the new status quo in NLP.Comment: 35 pages of content + 53 pages of reference