Towards Debiasing Sentence Representations

Paul Pu Liang, Irene Mengze Li, Emily Zheng, Yao Chong Lim, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, Louis-Philippe Morency


Abstract
As natural language processing methods are increasingly deployed in real-world scenarios such as healthcare, legal systems, and social science, it becomes necessary to recognize the role they potentially play in shaping social biases and stereotypes. Previous work has revealed the presence of social biases in widely used word embeddings involving gender, race, religion, and other social constructs. While some methods were proposed to debias these word-level embeddings, there is a need to perform debiasing at the sentence-level given the recent shift towards new contextualized sentence representations such as ELMo and BERT. In this paper, we investigate the presence of social biases in sentence-level representations and propose a new method, Sent-Debias, to reduce these biases. We show that Sent-Debias is effective in removing biases, and at the same time, preserves performance on sentence-level downstream tasks such as sentiment analysis, linguistic acceptability, and natural language understanding. We hope that our work will inspire future research on characterizing and removing social biases from widely adopted sentence representations for fairer NLP.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.488
Volume:
Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
July
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Dan Jurafsky, Joyce Chai, Natalie Schluter, Joel Tetreault
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5502–5515
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.488
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.488
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Paul Pu Liang, Irene Mengze Li, Emily Zheng, Yao Chong Lim, Ruslan Salakhutdinov, and Louis-Philippe Morency. 2020. Towards Debiasing Sentence Representations. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5502–5515, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Towards Debiasing Sentence Representations (Liang et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.488.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38928697
Code
 pliang279/sent_debias
Data
CoLAGLUEMELDQNLISSTSST-2WikiText-2