Natural Language Processing (NLP) models tend to inherit and amplify stereotypical biases present in their training data, leading to harmful societal consequences. Current efforts to rectify these biases typically revolve around making models oblivious to bias, which is at odds with the idea that humans require increased awareness to tackle these biases better. This prompts a fundamental research question: are bias-oblivious models the only viable solution to combat stereotypical biases? This paper answers this question by proposing the Agency-BeLiefs Embedding (ABLE) model, a novel approach that actively encodes stereotypical biases into the embedding space. ABLE draws upon social psychological theory to acquire and represent stereotypical biases in the form of agency and belief scores rather than directly representing stereotyped groups. Our experimental results showcase ABLE’s effectiveness in learning agency and belief stereotypes while preserving the language model’s proficiency. Furthermore, we underscore the practical significance of incorporating stereotypes within the ABLE model by demonstrating its utility in various downstream tasks. Our approach exemplifies the potential benefits of addressing bias through awareness, as opposed to the prevailing approach of mitigating bias through obliviousness.

Biases cause discrepancies in healthcare services. Race, gender, and age of a patient affect interactions with physicians and the medical treatments one receives. These biases in clinical practices can be amplified following the release of pre-trained language models trained on biomedical corpora. To bring awareness to such repercussions, we examine social biases present in the biomedical masked language models. We curate prompts based on evidence-based practice and compare generated diagnoses based on biases. For a case study, we measure bias in diagnosing coronary artery disease and using cardiovascular procedures based on bias. Our study demonstrates that biomedical models are less biased than BERT in gender, while the opposite is true for race and age.