How people talk about each other: Modeling Generalized Intergroup Bias and Emotion

Venkata Subrahmanyan Govindarajan, Katherine Atwell, Barea Sinno, Malihe Alikhani, David I. Beaver, Junyi Jessy Li


Abstract
Current studies of bias in NLP rely mainly on identifying (unwanted or negative) bias towards a specific demographic group. While this has led to progress recognizing and mitigating negative bias, and having a clear notion of the targeted group is necessary, it is not always practical. In this work we extrapolate to a broader notion of bias, rooted in social science and psychology literature. We move towards predicting interpersonal group relationship (IGR) - modeling the relationship between the speaker and the target in an utterance - using fine-grained interpersonal emotions as an anchor. We build and release a dataset of English tweets by US Congress members annotated for interpersonal emotion - the first of its kind, and ‘found supervision’ for IGR labels; our analyses show that subtle emotional signals are indicative of different biases. While humans can perform better than chance at identifying IGR given an utterance, we show that neural models perform much better; furthermore, a shared encoding between IGR and interpersonal perceived emotion enabled performance gains in both tasks.
Anthology ID:
2023.eacl-main.183
Volume:
Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics
Month:
May
Year:
2023
Address:
Dubrovnik, Croatia
Editors:
Andreas Vlachos, Isabelle Augenstein
Venue:
EACL
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
2496–2506
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.183
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.eacl-main.183
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Venkata Subrahmanyan Govindarajan, Katherine Atwell, Barea Sinno, Malihe Alikhani, David I. Beaver, and Junyi Jessy Li. 2023. How people talk about each other: Modeling Generalized Intergroup Bias and Emotion. In Proceedings of the 17th Conference of the European Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics, pages 2496–2506, Dubrovnik, Croatia. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
How people talk about each other: Modeling Generalized Intergroup Bias and Emotion (Govindarajan et al., EACL 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.183.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.eacl-main.183.mp4