Hannah Kirk


2023

pdf bib
The Past, Present and Better Future of Feedback Learning in Large Language Models for Subjective Human Preferences and Values
Hannah Kirk | Andrew Bean | Bertie Vidgen | Paul Rottger | Scott Hale
Proceedings of the 2023 Conference on Empirical Methods in Natural Language Processing

Human feedback is increasingly used to steer the behaviours of Large Language Models (LLMs). However, it is unclear how to collect and incorporate feedback in a way that is efficient, effective and unbiased, especially for highly subjective human preferences and values. In this paper, we survey existing approaches for learning from human feedback, drawing on 95 papers primarily from the ACL and arXiv repositories. First, we summarise the past, pre-LLM trends for integrating human feedback into language models. Second, we give an overview of present techniques and practices, as well as the motivations for using feedback; conceptual frameworks for defining values and preferences; and how feedback is collected and from whom. Finally, we encourage a better future of feedback learning in LLMs by raising five unresolved conceptual and practical challenges.

pdf bib
SemEval-2023 Task 10: Explainable Detection of Online Sexism
Hannah Kirk | Wenjie Yin | Bertie Vidgen | Paul Röttger
Proceedings of the 17th International Workshop on Semantic Evaluation (SemEval-2023)

Online sexism is a widespread and harmful phenomenon. Automated tools can assist the detection of sexism at scale. Binary detection, however, disregards the diversity of sexist content, and fails to provide clear explanations for why something is sexist. To address this issue, we introduce SemEval Task 10 on the Explainable Detection of Online Sexism (EDOS). We make three main contributions: i) a novel hierarchical taxonomy of sexist content, which includes granular vectors of sexism to aid explainability; ii) a new dataset of 20,000 social media comments with fine-grained labels, along with larger unlabelled datasets for model adaptation; and iii) baseline models as well as an analysis of the methods, results and errors for participant submissions to our task.

2022

pdf bib
Handling and Presenting Harmful Text in NLP Research
Hannah Kirk | Abeba Birhane | Bertie Vidgen | Leon Derczynski
Findings of the Association for Computational Linguistics: EMNLP 2022

Text data can pose a risk of harm. However, the risks are not fully understood, and how to handle, present, and discuss harmful text in a safe way remains an unresolved issue in the NLP community. We provide an analytical framework categorising harms on three axes: (1) the harm type (e.g., misinformation, hate speech or racial stereotypes); (2) whether a harm is sought as a feature of the research design if explicitly studying harmful content (e.g., training a hate speech classifier), versus unsought if harmful content is encountered when working on unrelated problems (e.g., language generation or part-of-speech tagging); and (3) who it affects, from people (mis)represented in the data to those handling the data and those publishing on the data. We provide advice for practitioners, with concrete steps for mitigating harm in research and in publication. To assist implementation we introduce HarmCheck – a documentation standard for handling and presenting harmful text in research.

pdf bib
A Prompt Array Keeps the Bias Away: Debiasing Vision-Language Models with Adversarial Learning
Hugo Berg | Siobhan Hall | Yash Bhalgat | Hannah Kirk | Aleksandar Shtedritski | Max Bain
Proceedings of the 2nd Conference of the Asia-Pacific Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics and the 12th International Joint Conference on Natural Language Processing (Volume 1: Long Papers)

Vision-language models can encode societal biases and stereotypes, but there are challenges to measuring and mitigating these multimodal harms due to lacking measurement robustness and feature degradation. To address these challenges, we investigate bias measures and apply ranking metrics for image-text representations. We then investigate debiasing methods and show that prepending learned embeddings to text queries that are jointly trained with adversarial debiasing and a contrastive loss, reduces various bias measures with minimal degradation to the image-text representation.

pdf bib
Looking for a Handsome Carpenter! Debiasing GPT-3 Job Advertisements
Conrad Borchers | Dalia Gala | Benjamin Gilburt | Eduard Oravkin | Wilfried Bounsi | Yuki M Asano | Hannah Kirk
Proceedings of the 4th Workshop on Gender Bias in Natural Language Processing (GeBNLP)

The growing capability and availability of generative language models has enabled a wide range of new downstream tasks. Academic research has identified, quantified and mitigated biases present in language models but is rarely tailored to downstream tasks where wider impact on individuals and society can be felt. In this work, we leverage one popular generative language model, GPT-3, with the goal of writing unbiased and realistic job advertisements. We first assess the bias and realism of zero-shot generated advertisements and compare them to real-world advertisements. We then evaluate prompt-engineering and fine-tuning as debiasing methods. We find that prompt-engineering with diversity-encouraging prompts gives no significant improvement to bias, nor realism. Conversely, fine-tuning, especially on unbiased real advertisements, can improve realism and reduce bias.

pdf bib
Is More Data Better? Re-thinking the Importance of Efficiency in Abusive Language Detection with Transformers-Based Active Learning
Hannah Kirk | Bertie Vidgen | Scott Hale
Proceedings of the Third Workshop on Threat, Aggression and Cyberbullying (TRAC 2022)

Annotating abusive language is expensive, logistically complex and creates a risk of psychological harm. However, most machine learning research has prioritized maximizing effectiveness (i.e., F1 or accuracy score) rather than data efficiency (i.e., minimizing the amount of data that is annotated). In this paper, we use simulated experiments over two datasets at varying percentages of abuse to demonstrate that transformers-based active learning is a promising approach to substantially raise efficiency whilst still maintaining high effectiveness, especially when abusive content is a smaller percentage of the dataset. This approach requires a fraction of labeled data to reach performance equivalent to training over the full dataset.

pdf bib
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection
Max Bartolo | Hannah Kirk | Pedro Rodriguez | Katerina Margatina | Tristan Thrush | Robin Jia | Pontus Stenetorp | Adina Williams | Douwe Kiela
Proceedings of the First Workshop on Dynamic Adversarial Data Collection

pdf bib
Hatemoji: A Test Suite and Adversarially-Generated Dataset for Benchmarking and Detecting Emoji-Based Hate
Hannah Kirk | Bertie Vidgen | Paul Rottger | Tristan Thrush | Scott Hale
Proceedings of the 2022 Conference of the North American Chapter of the Association for Computational Linguistics: Human Language Technologies

Detecting online hate is a complex task, and low-performing models have harmful consequences when used for sensitive applications such as content moderation. Emoji-based hate is an emerging challenge for automated detection. We present HatemojiCheck, a test suite of 3,930 short-form statements that allows us to evaluate performance on hateful language expressed with emoji. Using the test suite, we expose weaknesses in existing hate detection models. To address these weaknesses, we create the HatemojiBuild dataset using a human-and-model-in-the-loop approach. Models built with these 5,912 adversarial examples perform substantially better at detecting emoji-based hate, while retaining strong performance on text-only hate. Both HatemojiCheck and HatemojiBuild are made publicly available.

2021

pdf bib
Memes in the Wild: Assessing the Generalizability of the Hateful Memes Challenge Dataset
Hannah Kirk | Yennie Jun | Paulius Rauba | Gal Wachtel | Ruining Li | Xingjian Bai | Noah Broestl | Martin Doff-Sotta | Aleksandar Shtedritski | Yuki M Asano
Proceedings of the 5th Workshop on Online Abuse and Harms (WOAH 2021)

Hateful memes pose a unique challenge for current machine learning systems because their message is derived from both text- and visual-modalities. To this effect, Facebook released the Hateful Memes Challenge, a dataset of memes with pre-extracted text captions, but it is unclear whether these synthetic examples generalize to ‘memes in the wild’. In this paper, we collect hateful and non-hateful memes from Pinterest to evaluate out-of-sample performance on models pre-trained on the Facebook dataset. We find that ‘memes in the wild’ differ in two key aspects: 1) Captions must be extracted via OCR, injecting noise and diminishing performance of multimodal models, and 2) Memes are more diverse than ‘traditional memes’, including screenshots of conversations or text on a plain background. This paper thus serves as a reality-check for the current benchmark of hateful meme detection and its applicability for detecting real world hate.