Addressing Age-Related Bias in Sentiment Analysis

Addressing Age-Related Bias in Sentiment Analysis

Mark Díaz, Isaac Johnson, Amanda Lazar, Anne Marie Piper, Darren Gergle

Proceedings of the Twenty-Eighth International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence
Best Sister Conferences. Pages 6146-6150. https://doi.org/10.24963/ijcai.2019/852

Recent studies have identified various forms of bias in language-based models, raising concerns about the risk of propagating social biases against certain groups based on sociodemographic factors (e.g., gender, race, geography). In this study, we analyze the treatment of age-related terms across 15 sentiment analysis models and 10 widely-used GloVe word embeddings and attempt to alleviate bias through a method of processing model training data. Our results show significant age bias is encoded in the outputs of many sentiment analysis algorithms and word embeddings, and we can alleviate this bias by manipulating training data.
Keywords:
Natural Language Processing: Sentiment Analysis and Text Mining
Multidisciplinary Topics and Applications: Social Sciences
Humans and AI: Ethical Issues in AI