Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation

Emily Dinan, Angela Fan, Adina Williams, Jack Urbanek, Douwe Kiela, Jason Weston


Abstract
Social biases present in data are often directly reflected in the predictions of models trained on that data. We analyze gender bias in dialogue data, and examine how this bias is not only replicated, but is also amplified in subsequent generative chit-chat dialogue models. We measure gender bias in six existing dialogue datasets before selecting the most biased one, the multi-player text-based fantasy adventure dataset LIGHT, as a testbed for bias mitigation techniques. We consider three techniques to mitigate gender bias: counterfactual data augmentation, targeted data collection, and bias controlled training. We show that our proposed techniques mitigate gender bias by balancing the genderedness of generated dialogue utterances, and find that they are particularly effective in combination. We evaluate model performance with a variety of quantitative methods—including the quantity of gendered words, a dialogue safety classifier, and human assessments—all of which show that our models generate less gendered, but equally engaging chit-chat responses.
Anthology ID:
2020.emnlp-main.656
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP)
Month:
November
Year:
2020
Address:
Online
Editors:
Bonnie Webber, Trevor Cohn, Yulan He, Yang Liu
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
8173–8188
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.656
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.emnlp-main.656
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Emily Dinan, Angela Fan, Adina Williams, Jack Urbanek, Douwe Kiela, and Jason Weston. 2020. Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation. In Proceedings of the 2020 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing (EMNLP), pages 8173–8188, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Queens are Powerful too: Mitigating Gender Bias in Dialogue Generation (Dinan et al., EMNLP 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.emnlp-main.656.pdf
Video:
 https://slideslive.com/38938780