Social Bias Probing: Fairness Benchmarking for Language Models

Marta Marchiori Manerba, Karolina Stanczak, Riccardo Guidotti, Isabelle Augenstein


Abstract
While the impact of social biases in language models has been recognized, prior methods for bias evaluation have been limited to binary association tests on small datasets, limiting our understanding of bias complexities. This paper proposes a novel framework for probing language models for social biases by assessing disparate treatment, which involves treating individuals differently according to their affiliation with a sensitive demographic group. We curate SoFa, a large-scale benchmark designed to address the limitations of existing fairness collections. SoFa expands the analysis beyond the binary comparison of stereotypical versus anti-stereotypical identities to include a diverse range of identities and stereotypes. Comparing our methodology with existing benchmarks, we reveal that biases within language models are more nuanced than acknowledged, indicating a broader scope of encoded biases than previously recognized. Benchmarking LMs on SoFa, we expose how identities expressing different religions lead to the most pronounced disparate treatments across all models. Finally, our findings indicate that real-life adversities faced by various groups such as women and people with disabilities are mirrored in the behavior of these models.
Anthology ID:
2024.emnlp-main.812
Volume:
Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing
Month:
November
Year:
2024
Address:
Miami, Florida, USA
Editors:
Yaser Al-Onaizan, Mohit Bansal, Yun-Nung Chen
Venue:
EMNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
14653–14671
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.812
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Marta Marchiori Manerba, Karolina Stanczak, Riccardo Guidotti, and Isabelle Augenstein. 2024. Social Bias Probing: Fairness Benchmarking for Language Models. In Proceedings of the 2024 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing, pages 14653–14671, Miami, Florida, USA. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Social Bias Probing: Fairness Benchmarking for Language Models (Marchiori Manerba et al., EMNLP 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.emnlp-main.812.pdf
Software:
 2024.emnlp-main.812.software.zip