Improving Gender Fairness of Pre-Trained Language Models without Catastrophic Forgetting

Zahra Fatemi, Chen Xing, Wenhao Liu, Caimming Xiong


Abstract
Existing studies addressing gender bias of pre-trained language models, usually build a small gender-neutral data set and conduct a second phase pre-training on the model with such data. However, given the limited size and concentrated focus of the gender-neutral data, catastrophic forgetting would occur during second-phase pre-training. Forgetting information in the original training data may damage the model’s downstream performance by a large margin. In this work, we empirically show that catastrophic forgetting occurs in such methods by evaluating them with general NLP tasks in GLUE. Then, we propose a new method, GEnder Equality Prompt (GEEP), to improve gender fairness of pre-trained models with less forgetting. GEEP freezes the pre-trained model and learns gender-related prompts with gender-neutral data. Empirical results show that GEEP not only achieves SOTA performances on gender fairness tasks, but also forgets less and performs better on GLUE by a large margin.
Anthology ID:
2023.acl-short.108
Volume:
Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers)
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
ACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
1249–1262
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.108
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.acl-short.108
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Zahra Fatemi, Chen Xing, Wenhao Liu, and Caimming Xiong. 2023. Improving Gender Fairness of Pre-Trained Language Models without Catastrophic Forgetting. In Proceedings of the 61st Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics (Volume 2: Short Papers), pages 1249–1262, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Improving Gender Fairness of Pre-Trained Language Models without Catastrophic Forgetting (Fatemi et al., ACL 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.108.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.acl-short.108.mp4