Semi-Supervised Topic Modeling for Gender Bias Discovery in English and Swedish

Hannah Devinney, Jenny Björklund, Henrik Björklund


Abstract
Gender bias has been identified in many models for Natural Language Processing, stemming from implicit biases in the text corpora used to train the models. Such corpora are too large to closely analyze for biased or stereotypical content. Thus, we argue for a combination of quantitative and qualitative methods, where the quantitative part produces a view of the data of a size suitable for qualitative analysis. We investigate the usefulness of semi-supervised topic modeling for the detection and analysis of gender bias in three corpora (mainstream news articles in English and Swedish, and LGBTQ+ web content in English). We compare differences in topic models for three gender categories (masculine, feminine, and nonbinary or neutral) in each corpus. We find that in all corpora, genders are treated differently and that these differences tend to correspond to hegemonic ideas of gender.
Anthology ID:
2020.gebnlp-1.8
Volume:
Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2020
Address:
Barcelona, Spain (Online)
Editors:
Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Hardmeier, Will Radford, Kellie Webster
Venue:
GeBNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
79–92
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.gebnlp-1.8
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Hannah Devinney, Jenny Björklund, and Henrik Björklund. 2020. Semi-Supervised Topic Modeling for Gender Bias Discovery in English and Swedish. In Proceedings of the Second Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, pages 79–92, Barcelona, Spain (Online). Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Semi-Supervised Topic Modeling for Gender Bias Discovery in English and Swedish (Devinney et al., GeBNLP 2020)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2020.gebnlp-1.8.pdf