Applying the Stereotype Content Model to assess disability bias in popular pre-trained NLP models underlying AI-based assistive technologies

Brienna Herold, James Waller, Raja Kushalnagar


Abstract
Stereotypes are a positive or negative, generalized, and often widely shared belief about the attributes of certain groups of people, such as people with sensory disabilities. If stereotypes manifest in assistive technologies used by deaf or blind people, they can harm the user in a number of ways, especially considering the vulnerable nature of the target population. AI models underlying assistive technologies have been shown to contain biased stereotypes, including racial, gender, and disability biases. We build on this work to present a psychology-based stereotype assessment of the representation of disability, deafness, and blindness in BERT using the Stereotype Content Model. We show that BERT contains disability bias, and that this bias differs along established stereotype dimensions.
Anthology ID:
2022.slpat-1.8
Volume:
Ninth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT-2022)
Month:
May
Year:
2022
Address:
Dublin, Ireland
Editors:
Sarah Ebling, Emily Prud’hommeaux, Preethi Vaidyanathan
Venue:
SLPAT
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
58–65
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.slpat-1.8
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2022.slpat-1.8
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Brienna Herold, James Waller, and Raja Kushalnagar. 2022. Applying the Stereotype Content Model to assess disability bias in popular pre-trained NLP models underlying AI-based assistive technologies. In Ninth Workshop on Speech and Language Processing for Assistive Technologies (SLPAT-2022), pages 58–65, Dublin, Ireland. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Applying the Stereotype Content Model to assess disability bias in popular pre-trained NLP models underlying AI-based assistive technologies (Herold et al., SLPAT 2022)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2022.slpat-1.8.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2022.slpat-1.8.mp4