Gender-tuning: Empowering Fine-tuning for Debiasing Pre-trained Language Models

Somayeh Ghanbarzadeh, Yan Huang, Hamid Palangi, Radames Cruz Moreno, Hamed Khanpour


Abstract
Recent studies have revealed that the widely-used Pre-trained Language Models (PLMs) propagate societal biases from the large unmoderated pre-training corpora. Existing solutions require debiasing training processes and datasets for debiasing, which are resource-intensive and costly. Furthermore, these methods hurt the PLMs’ performance on downstream tasks. In this study, we propose Gender-tuning, which debiases the PLMs through fine-tuning on downstream tasks’ datasets. For this aim, Gender-tuning integrates Masked Language Modeling (MLM) training objectives into fine-tuning’s training process. Comprehensive experiments show that Gender-tuning outperforms the state-of-the-art baselines in terms of average gender bias scores in PLMs while improving PLMs’ performance on downstream tasks solely using the downstream tasks’ dataset. Also, Gender-tuning is a deployable debiasing tool for any PLM that works with original fine-tuning.
Anthology ID:
2023.findings-acl.336
Volume:
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023
Month:
July
Year:
2023
Address:
Toronto, Canada
Editors:
Anna Rogers, Jordan Boyd-Graber, Naoaki Okazaki
Venue:
Findings
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
5448–5458
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.336
DOI:
10.18653/v1/2023.findings-acl.336
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Somayeh Ghanbarzadeh, Yan Huang, Hamid Palangi, Radames Cruz Moreno, and Hamed Khanpour. 2023. Gender-tuning: Empowering Fine-tuning for Debiasing Pre-trained Language Models. In Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: ACL 2023, pages 5448–5458, Toronto, Canada. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Gender-tuning: Empowering Fine-tuning for Debiasing Pre-trained Language Models (Ghanbarzadeh et al., Findings 2023)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2023.findings-acl.336.pdf