Language-Agnostic Bias Detection in Language Models with Bias Probing

Pretrained language models (PLMs) are key components in NLP, but they contain strong social biases. Quantifying these biases is challenging because current methods focusing on fill-the-mask objectives are sensitive to slight changes in input. To address this, we propose a bias probing technique called LABDet, for evaluating social bias in PLMs with a robust and language-agnostic method. For nationality as a case study, we show that LABDet `surfaces' nationality bias by training a classifier on top of a frozen PLM on non-nationality sentiment detection. We find consistent patterns of nationality bias across monolingual PLMs in six languages that align with historical and political context. We also show for English BERT that bias surfaced by LABDet correlates well with bias in the pretraining data; thus, our work is one of the few studies that directly links pretraining data to PLM behavior. Finally, we verify LABDet's reliability and applicability to different templates and languages through an extensive set of robustness checks. We publicly share our code and dataset in https://github.com/akoksal/LABDet.Comment: EMNLP 2023 Finding

Why Do Populist Incumbents Survive Economic Crises? How Economic Appeals Won Voters in Turkey’s 2023 Election

Why do incumbents retain public approval despite economic crises? To win voters, incumbents generally—and populist incumbents specifically—may pursue two strategies. First, to reduce the salience of their poor economic performance, incumbents can shift the agenda to sociocultural issues, a common tactic among populist leaders. Alternatively, incumbents can employ economic appeals by emphasizing their policy achievements and competence as managers of the economy. To test the effectiveness of these strategies, we conducted a survey experiment with 2,400 Turkish citizens before Turkey’s 2023 election, in which respondents were exposed to rhetoric simulating the incumbent’s campaign messaging about sociocultural or economic issues. Whereas the incumbent’s sociocultural rhetoric had no significant effects, economic appeals significantly increased respondents’ approval of the incumbent’s economic management and overall performance. Campaign promises about mega-projects and economic nationalism emerge as key mechanisms increasing approval of the incumbent

Neighborhood Segregation Preferences Among Migrants and Host Community Members in Turkey

This project explores immigrant inclusion at the neighborhood level through a conjoint experiment that examines migrant and host community preferences for residential segregation. It considers this topic in the context of Turkey, a country that has experienced massive in-migration of refugees from the Syrian civil war. The experiment is implemented through a 5000 person door-to-door survey in Adana, Turkey that draws equally from migrant (Syrian) and host (Turk) populations. The primary focus of the conjoint is on neighborhood demographic composition and whether the effect of in-group size on willingness to live in the neighborhood is symmetric or asymmetric for migrant and host populations

A Statistical Approach to Evaluate The Performance of Cardiac Biomarkers in Predicting Death Due To Acute Myocardial Infarction: Time-Dependent Roc Curve

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