A Fairness Analysis of Human and AI-Generated Student Reflection Summaries

Bhiman Baghel, Arun Balajiee Lekshmi Narayanan, Michael Yoder


Abstract
This study examines the fairness of human- and AI-generated summaries of student reflections in university STEM classes, focusing on potential gender biases. Using topic modeling, we first identify topics that are more prevalent in reflections from female students and others that are more common among male students. We then analyze whether human and AI-generated summaries reflect the concerns of students of any particular gender over others. Our analysis reveals that though human-generated and extractive AI summarization techniques do not show a clear bias, abstractive AI-generated summaries exhibit a bias towards male students. Pedagogical themes are over-represented from male reflections in these summaries, while concept-specific topics are under-represented from female reflections. This research contributes to a deeper understanding of AI-generated bias in educational contexts, highlighting the need for future work on mitigating these biases.
Anthology ID:
2024.gebnlp-1.5
Volume:
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)
Month:
August
Year:
2024
Address:
Bangkok, Thailand
Editors:
Agnieszka Faleńska, Christine Basta, Marta Costa-jussà, Seraphina Goldfarb-Tarrant, Debora Nozza
Venues:
GeBNLP | WS
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
60–77
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.gebnlp-1.5
DOI:
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Bhiman Baghel, Arun Balajiee Lekshmi Narayanan, and Michael Yoder. 2024. A Fairness Analysis of Human and AI-Generated Student Reflection Summaries. In Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP), pages 60–77, Bangkok, Thailand. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
A Fairness Analysis of Human and AI-Generated Student Reflection Summaries (Baghel et al., GeBNLP-WS 2024)
Copy Citation:
PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/2024.gebnlp-1.5.pdf