Toward Deconfounding the Effect of Entity Demographics for Question Answering Accuracy

Maharshi Gor, Kellie Webster, Jordan Boyd-Graber


Abstract
The goal of question answering (QA) is to answer _any_ question. However, major QA datasets have skewed distributions over gender, profession, and nationality. Despite that skew, an analysis of model accuracy reveals little evidence that accuracy is lower for people based on gender or nationality; instead, there is more variation on professions (question topic) and question ambiguity. But QA’s lack of representation could itself hide evidence of bias, necessitating QA datasets that better represent global diversity.
Anthology ID:
2021.emnlp-main.444
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2021
Address:
Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic
Editors:
Marie-Francine Moens, Xuanjing Huang, Lucia Specia, Scott Wen-tau Yih
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5457–5473
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.444
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2021.emnlp-main.444
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Maharshi Gor, Kellie Webster, and Jordan Boyd-Graber. 2021. Toward Deconfounding the Effect of Entity Demographics for Question Answering Accuracy. In Proceedings of the 2021 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 5457–5473, Online and Punta Cana, Dominican Republic. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Toward Deconfounding the Effect of Entity Demographics for Question Answering Accuracy (Gor et al., EMNLP 2021)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.444.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2021.emnlp-main.444.mp4
Data
Natural QuestionsSQuADTriviaQA