Double-Hard Debias: Tailoring Word Embeddings for Gender Bias Mitigation

Tianlu Wang, Xi Victoria Lin, Nazneen Fatema Rajani, Bryan McCann, Vicente Ordonez, Caiming Xiong


Abstract
Word embeddings derived from human-generated corpora inherit strong gender bias which can be further amplified by downstream models. Some commonly adopted debiasing approaches, including the seminal Hard Debias algorithm, apply post-processing procedures that project pre-trained word embeddings into a subspace orthogonal to an inferred gender subspace. We discover that semantic-agnostic corpus regularities such as word frequency captured by the word embeddings negatively impact the performance of these algorithms. We propose a simple but effective technique, Double Hard Debias, which purifies the word embeddings against such corpus regularities prior to inferring and removing the gender subspace. Experiments on three bias mitigation benchmarks show that our approach preserves the distributional semantics of the pre-trained word embeddings while reducing gender bias to a significantly larger degree than prior approaches.
Anthology ID:
2020.acl-main.484
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:
5443–5453
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.484
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2020.acl-main.484
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Tianlu Wang, Xi Victoria Lin, Nazneen Fatema Rajani, Bryan McCann, Vicente Ordonez, and Caiming Xiong. 2020. Double-Hard Debias: Tailoring Word Embeddings for Gender Bias Mitigation. In Proceedings of the 58th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 5443–5453, Online. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Double-Hard Debias: Tailoring Word Embeddings for Gender Bias Mitigation (Wang et al., ACL 2020)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.acl-main.484.pdf
Video:
 http://slideslive.com/38929050
Code
 uvavision/Double-Hard-Debias
Data
WinoBias