Equalizing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation with Word Embeddings Techniques

Joel Escudé Font, Marta R. Costa-jussà


Abstract
Neural machine translation has significantly pushed forward the quality of the field. However, there are remaining big issues with the output translations and one of them is fairness. Neural models are trained on large text corpora which contain biases and stereotypes. As a consequence, models inherit these social biases. Recent methods have shown results in reducing gender bias in other natural language processing tools such as word embeddings. We take advantage of the fact that word embeddings are used in neural machine translation to propose a method to equalize gender biases in neural machine translation using these representations. Specifically, we propose, experiment and analyze the integration of two debiasing techniques over GloVe embeddings in the Transformer translation architecture. We evaluate our proposed system on the WMT English-Spanish benchmark task, showing gains up to one BLEU point. As for the gender bias evaluation, we generate a test set of occupations and we show that our proposed system learns to equalize existing biases from the baseline system.
Anthology ID:
W19-3821
Volume:
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing
Month:
August
Year:
2019
Address:
Florence, Italy
Editors:
Marta R. Costa-jussà, Christian Hardmeier, Will Radford, Kellie Webster
Venue:
GeBNLP
SIG:
Publisher:
Association for Computational Linguistics
Note:
Pages:
147–154
Language:
URL:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3821
DOI:
10.18653/v1/W19-3821
Bibkey:
Cite (ACL):
Joel Escudé Font and Marta R. Costa-jussà. 2019. Equalizing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation with Word Embeddings Techniques. In Proceedings of the First Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing, pages 147–154, Florence, Italy. Association for Computational Linguistics.
Cite (Informal):
Equalizing Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation with Word Embeddings Techniques (Escudé Font & Costa-jussà, GeBNLP 2019)
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PDF:
https://aclanthology.org/W19-3821.pdf