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Language-Agnostic Bias Detection in Language Models with Bias Probing

Abdullatif Köksal, Omer Yalcin, Ahmet Akbiyik, M. Kilavuz, Anna Korhonen, Hinrich Schuetze


Abstract
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.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-emnlp.848
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
12735–12747
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.848
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-emnlp.848
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Abdullatif Köksal, Omer Yalcin, Ahmet Akbiyik, M. Kilavuz, Anna Korhonen, and Hinrich Schuetze. 2023. Language-Agnostic Bias Detection in Language Models with Bias Probing. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2023, pages 12735–12747, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Language-Agnostic Bias Detection in Language Models with Bias Probing (Köksal et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-emnlp.848.pdf