Bias Neutralization in Non-Parallel Texts: A Cyclic Approach with Auxiliary Guidance

Karthic Madanagopal, James Caverlee


Abstract
Objectivity is a goal for Wikipedia and many news sites, as well as a guiding principle of many large language models. Indeed, several methods have recently been developed for automatic subjective bias neutralization. These methods, however, typically rely on parallel text for training (i.e. a biased sentence coupled with a non-biased sentence), demonstrate poor transfer to new domains, and can lose important bias-independent context. Toward expanding the reach of bias neutralization, we propose in this paper a new approach called FairBalance. Three of its unique features are: i) a cycle consistent adversarial network enables bias neutralization without the need for parallel text; ii) the model design preserves bias-independent content; and iii) through auxiliary guidance, the model highlights sequences of bias-inducing words, yielding strong results in terms of bias neutralization quality. Extensive experiments demonstrate how FairBalance significantly improves subjective bias neutralization compared to other methods.
Anthology ID:
2023.emnlp-main.882
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
December
Year:
2023
Address:
Singapore
Editors:
Houda Bouamor, Juan Pino, Kalika Bali
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14265–14278
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.882
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.emnlp-main.882
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Karthic Madanagopal and James Caverlee. 2023. Bias Neutralization in Non-Parallel Texts: A Cyclic Approach with Auxiliary Guidance. In Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 14265–14278, Singapore. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Bias Neutralization in Non-Parallel Texts: A Cyclic Approach with Auxiliary Guidance (Madanagopal & Caverlee, EMNLP 2023)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.882.pdf
Video:
 https://aclanthology.org/2023.emnlp-main.882.mp4