Mind Your Bias: A Critical Review of Bias Detection Methods for Contextual Language Models

Silke Husse, Andreas Spitz


Abstract
The awareness and mitigation of biases are of fundamental importance for the fair and transparent use of contextual language models, yet they crucially depend on the accurate detection of biases as a precursor. Consequently, numerous bias detection methods have been proposed, which vary in their approach, the considered type of bias, and the data used for evaluation. However, while most detection methods are derived from the word embedding association test for static word embeddings, the reported results are heterogeneous, inconsistent, and ultimately inconclusive. To address this issue, we conduct a rigorous analysis and comparison of bias detection methods for contextual language models. Our results show that minor design and implementation decisions (or errors) have a substantial and often significant impact on the derived bias scores. Overall, we find the state of the field to be both worse than previously acknowledged due to systematic and propagated errors in implementations, yet better than anticipated since divergent results in the literature homogenize after accounting for implementation errors. Based on our findings, we conclude with a discussion of paths towards more robust and consistent bias detection methods.
Anthology ID:
2022.findings-emnlp.311
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022
Month:
December
Year:
2022
Address:
Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Editors:
Yoav Goldberg, Zornitsa Kozareva, Yue Zhang
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
4212–4234
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.311
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.findings-emnlp.311
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Silke Husse and Andreas Spitz. 2022. Mind Your Bias: A Critical Review of Bias Detection Methods for Contextual Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022, pages 4212–4234, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Mind Your Bias: A Critical Review of Bias Detection Methods for Contextual Language Models (Husse & Spitz, Findings 2022)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.findings-emnlp.311.pdf