Delivering Fairness in Human Resources AI: Mutual Information to the Rescue

Leo Hemamou, William Coleman


Abstract
Automatic language processing is used frequently in the Human Resources (HR) sector for automated candidate sourcing and evaluation of resumes. These models often use pre-trained language models where it is difficult to know if possible biases exist. Recently, Mutual Information (MI) methods have demonstrated notable performance in obtaining representations agnostic to sensitive variables such as gender or ethnicity. However, accessing these variables can sometimes be challenging, and their use is prohibited in some jurisdictions. These factors can make detecting and mitigating biases challenging. In this context, we propose to minimize the MI between a candidate’s name and a latent representation of their CV or short biography. This method may mitigate bias from sensitive variables without requiring the collection of these variables. We evaluate this methodology by first projecting the name representation into a smaller space to prevent potential MI minimization problems in high dimensions.
Anthology ID:
2022.aacl-main.64
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)
Month:
November
Year:
2022
Address:
Online only
Editors:
Yulan He, Heng Ji, Sujian Li, Yang Liu, Chua-Hui Chang
Venues:
AACL | IJCNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
867–882
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.64
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Leo Hemamou and William Coleman. 2022. Delivering Fairness in Human Resources AI: Mutual Information to the Rescue. In Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers), pages 867–882, Online only. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Delivering Fairness in Human Resources AI: Mutual Information to the Rescue (Hemamou & Coleman, AACL-IJCNLP 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.aacl-main.64.pdf