Chahat Raj


2024

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BiasDora: Exploring Hidden Biased Associations in Vision-Language Models
Chahat Raj | Anjishnu Mukherjee | Aylin Caliskan | Antonios Anastasopoulos | Ziwei Zhu
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2024

Existing works examining Vision-Language Models (VLMs) for social biases predominantly focus on a limited set of documented bias associations, such as gender-profession or race-crime. This narrow scope often overlooks a vast range of unexamined implicit associations, restricting the identification and, hence, mitigation of such biases. We address this gap by probing VLMs to (1) uncover hidden, implicit associations across 9 bias dimensions. We systematically explore diverse input and output modalities and (2) demonstrate how biased associations vary in their negativity, toxicity, and extremity. Our work (3) identifies subtle and extreme biases that are typically not recognized by existing methodologies. We make the **D**ataset **o**f **r**etrieved **a**ssociations (**Dora**) publicly available.

2023

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Global Voices, Local Biases: Socio-Cultural Prejudices across Languages
Anjishnu Mukherjee | Chahat Raj | Ziwei Zhu | Antonios Anastasopoulos
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Human biases are ubiquitous but not uniform: disparities exist across linguistic, cultural, and societal borders. As large amounts of recent literature suggest, language models (LMs) trained on human data can reflect and often amplify the effects of these social biases. However, the vast majority of existing studies on bias are heavily skewed towards Western and European languages. In this work, we scale the Word Embedding Association Test (WEAT) to 24 languages, enabling broader studies and yielding interesting findings about LM bias. We additionally enhance this data with culturally relevant information for each language, capturing local contexts on a global scale. Further, to encompass more widely prevalent societal biases, we examine new bias dimensions across toxicity, ableism, and more. Moreover, we delve deeper into the Indian linguistic landscape, conducting a comprehensive regional bias analysis across six prevalent Indian languages. Finally, we highlight the significance of these social biases and the new dimensions through an extensive comparison of embedding methods, reinforcing the need to address them in pursuit of more equitable language models.